I felt as if my skull were coming apart. Blood dripped from my nose. I coughed on a mouthful of it, and felt more of it—at least I thought it was blood—squeezing from my ear as the rest of the thing, nearly three feet of it, snapped up into my ear canal like an elastic string that had been stretched and released.
Wide-eyed, my hands grasping my skull as if necessary to keep it together in one piece, I staggered to my feet, looked at Paulson.
He was sitting up now, one hand wiping goo from his ear, the side of his face and neck. He looked dazed and slightly embarrassed.
“It worked,” he whispered. “It worked.”
I clutched the sides of my head. “What the fuck? The fuck did you do to me? The fuck was that?”
I could feel whatever it was inside me, inside my head. I could hear my song again, playing through Paulson's hidden speakers. Whatever was inside me wasn't clogging my ear canal anymore. It had punched through my skull somehow, and I could feel it coiling around my brain, settling down.
Settling in.
“Sorry,” he muttered, pinching the space between his eyes and sighing. “Sorry. God, you don't know how sorry I am. It'll hurt for a while, sure. Can't help that. But once it's done, once it's at home, you'll be able to do so much more with it than I ever could.”
* * *
The kid, E-Z Mike—his real name was Bryan Montgomery. Street cred, yo!—looked at me quizzically. “Ummm…wow, dude. I mean…I never heard of Linus Pauling.”
“Paulson,” I corrected, then poured a glass of champagne. Until this afternoon, I hadn't been able to drink champagne in almost a decade, which was ironic because I could afford a cellar of the stuff now.
“Did he live here once? I mean, that set-up sounds exactly like the one you showed me earlier, where you played my music.” E-Z Mike chewed on this a moment, rubbed his forehead in confusion. His eyes looked bleary, dull.
He took one or two deep breaths, closed his eyes.
“Dude, what was in that spliff you gave me? My head's been fuzzy all morning, but now it's throbbin' man. Poundin'. Did I fall asleep…cuz I don't remember…”
His ridiculously boyish hand shot across the table, grabbed the bottle of Cristal, lifted it to his mouth.
“Oh that's just gonna make it worse, kiddo,” I said, smiling as I watched him completely ignore me, tip the shiny bottle back and pour the champagne down his throat.
I counted one, two, three seconds, then the kid lurched to his feet, still clutching his head as if it threatened to split apart.
It was a feeling I knew intimately.
“Yeah, you're not gonna be able to drink alcohol…like ever. Or do drugs, smoke weed. Pretty much anything that's a fun and/or illicit substance.”
E-Z Mike staggered back to the table, stared at me with teary eyes.
He was afraid, terrified, more so than if I'd held a TEC-9 to his head, because that was something he could understand, wrap his mind around.
This wasn't, though I have to admit it was fun to watch the slow, slow realization creep into his eyes.
God, I wondered. Was I that stupid when Paulson passed it to me?
I watched him across the table as he struggled to put it together, put it into words.
“You…upstairs…on the couch. I was passed out, whacked out. Man, that story…was that what happened? Was that what you did to me?”
He was practically weeping now, the swagger and faux-urban demeanor he wore was sloughing off, falling away, leaving behind a frightened, suburban kid. And one without the vast army of handlers who orbited him all the time. I saw to it that he came to me alone. Otherwise, how?
“Yeah, kid. Happened to you just like it happened to me. Only your weaknesses made it easier for me to pass it to you.”
He was breathing hard now, almost sobbing. “Why? Why would you do that to me? What for?”
“You asked for it,” I said, taking a pull from the flute of Cristal I twirled in my fingers. “You asked, your manager asked, your publicist asked. The label asked. Fuck, your mother called me several times to ask. 'Give him the secret,' they told me. 'Train him. Just tell him how you do it. He's so eager to learn, so eager to succeed like you.' Fuck man, you practically begged me to do this.”
E-Z Mike slumped into the chair opposite me, his elbows on the table supporting his head. He looked pale and drawn, his eyes deep-set and bruised.
“What is it? What's…inside me?” he croaked.
“Oh, you want the rest of the story? Fine. Just know, from the outset, that it ends well for everyone. Well, for Paulson years ago, for me now, and for you…well, that's for you to decide.”
* * *
So, I told the little fuck. The Cristal was heating up in my belly, in my now vacant skull. After ten years with no drinking, I was a real lightweight, and he irritated me. I thought I’d made the wrong decision, passed the thing along to the wrong person.
I mean, Christ, I didn't break down and bawl when Paulson passed it me.
But still, I told him.
It was inside him now, the earworm, and he had to know.
Had to know how it was able to transform his music into the kind of hits that invade people's brains, burrow down into their bones, play on and on inside their minds. It would make music that people would want, would hum, would spin the radio dial to find, would buy.
All it asked of you was a clean body to live in while it did so, no drugs or alcohol or any of that shit. Ever.
I told him all this, how he could churn out hit after hit after hit until he couldn’t spend the money he was making fast enough. Until he couldn't build a house big enough to hold all the money and the awards that they'd dump on him.
I told him how he could make his life like mine now, spend that time in the studio, pump out the jams and watch the Benjamins and accolades roll in.
For as long as he wanted.
He listened as I laid all this out. Eventually, feeling better as the thing settled inside his skull, his hands fell away from his head, fingers twitching on the table.
I knew that look, knew that feeling. It was already inside him, working its mojo on him. I gave it about three or four months before E-Z Mike would roll out an album that would blow the doors off all his other albums.
In the meantime, I'd be far from here, on a beach somewhere, stretched out with a succession of drinks served in coconuts with umbrellas in them. Stretched out with a succession of lovely island women who didn’t mind if I kept a hat on while we made the beast with two backs.
E-Z Mike sneered at me now, thinking he had it all figured out, thinking that I was the king of all assholes. I mean, why else would I let all this go?
Kids today.
“Don't worry about me, señor,” I said, taking one of the linen napkins from the table and unfolding it. “I'll be just fine. What you'll learn is that you gotta know when to get out of the game.”
E-Z Mike's sneer tightened. I wasn't just an asshole, I was retarded.
“So, like the only catch here is no drugs, no liquor. That right?”
“Yep. Doesn’t like to eat that shit.”
“Then what's it like to eat?”
I took a deep breath, then pushed back the hood of the satin robe I wore, exposing the ruin of my collapsed skull, the puckered, creased skin at the top of my head where the bone—and much of the brain beneath—had been eaten away.
“Oh, don't worry about that, either. I suspect even an idiot like you has enough to keep it fed for a while.”
Bryan Montgomery fell back in his chair, his mouth open.
I put the napkin to my nostrils and blew out what I hoped would be the final bits of what the earworm had digested, set the napkin on the table before me.
“You might want to think about just how many hits you want to have, right now, before…well, before you can't think anymore.”
John F.D. Taff
Musical Inspiration for “That Song You Can’t Get Out of Your Head”
What inspi
red my story isn't really a single song, but rather an entire class of songs. "That Song You Can't Get Out of Your Head" is dedicated to all of those tunes that, once mentioned, play in a damnable, eternal loop in your head until they drive you quite mad.
I guess what started me thinking about this is—and I hope you're reading this after the story, otherwise you’re about to be spoiled—the internet meme of the earworm. Oh, that's a lovely, lovely word, isn’t it? Earworm? But I couldn’t put that into the title, or even allude to it in the story, without giving the whole thing away.
I suppose that if there was a single song that made me think of this idea, it was that old Disney earworm "It's a Small World." There. You got it. Can't quite get it out of your head now, can you? Heh…
Somewhere in the skies over New England, I watch Rhonda from Albuquerque tip and plunge toward the patchwork earth below, a fleshy ballistic missile in a flower print muumuu.
Only a few moments ago I stood behind her, waiting on the first-class john to free up, wearing my best not-a-terrorist-just-trying-to-get-a-tinkle-in-before-we-begin-our-descent face, and then—whoosh—Lady Kismet plucks the pair of us up and out of a jagged rectangle of torn metal, into the blinding blue.
A fat camp alumnus in recently renewed good standing, I understand all too well the pain of a belly flop from six feet—never mind thirty thousand—but I am not yet so resigned as to follow Rhonda’s kamikaze lead. So I flail myself into a spread eagle position, slacks torn clean off, fut fut fut-ing flab waging an epic slap fight against the laws of aerodynamics, my briefs moonlighting as a windsock in the jet stream.
Time slows. I recall my wife Simone standing in the plastic sheeting doorway of the backyard greenhouse-cum-pesticide laboratory yesterday afternoon, arms crossed, grimacing at the rows of fellow ex-supermodels hunched over terrariums full of writhing grubs, mosquitoes and hornets.
* * *
“I never thought I could pity a bug until I saw you go to work on one,” Simone said.
She never forgave me for abandoning my perfuming career. But after the Cape Town incident, what choice did I have? Rogue synthetic pheromones, swarms of locust, siafu ants, mud wasps, witch doctor triage in a tribal village, paparazzi documenting mass disfigurement of internationally renowned lingerie models in real time on virtually every existing fashion blog—the Hubris launch had been high-grade tabloid catnip, an irredeemable fiasco.
I’d since made amends best I could, shifting professional gears to keep up with civil litigation reparations and honoring the contracts of those Philyra’s Nymphs who stayed on to help me develop Pestilence by Beemahr, a slightly modified signature version of Hubris, designed to awaken the latent insectivorous urge in certain unpopular arthropods. And while my lavender-scented uber-pesticide does possess a certain green chic flair—what could be more organic than cannibalism, really?—it isn’t exactly the kind of invention that garners entrée to the exclusive runway parties to which Simone had become accustomed as the face of my early campaigns.
Alas, many of the girls didn’t consider shaking the very foundations of the pest control-industrial complex much of a consolation prize. And Simone, especially, felt obligated to remind me of my failure at every turn, as if awakening every morning to a once million-dollar face mottled by a cloud of African insects wasn’t admonishment enough.
Ciro Argyros trotted by, pushing a wheelbarrow full of mealworms. He gave me a cool nod, as if I were a too-shy autograph seeker, not his boss, and Simone’s platforms clacked away after him.
Thank Christ, I mouthed at the earwig jittering through its death dance in the petri dish before me. Still, I felt a familiar twinge of guilt at my secret knowledge of the futility of her pursuit: Ciro had mistaken me for an injured model as we both lay on stretchers in that godforsaken adobe South African clinic. In his defense, I had been swaddled in an English Patient-esque mummy wrap, and bites and stings had transformed the actual talent around us into less attractive cousins of Joseph Merrick. Morphine made the usually aloof celebrity photographer chatty enough to not only relate the details of Simone’s many and sundry garish advances, but also to confide that, newly disfigured or no, he was one former Greek Adonis who’d rather lay his locust-ransacked eye socket over a Formosan termite mound than bed a model dancing on the wrong 18-to-34 demographic pole.
Still, if unrequited love helped Simone maintain a little joie de vivre while I accumulated the capital necessary to raise an army of plastic surgeons, so be it.
I tweezered up the next earwig and dabbed a drop of my Pestilence just above its third thoracic ganglia, praying for signs of rabid derangement that might put a giant metaphorical exclamation point on my planned presentation the next day at a United States Forest Service outpost in New Hampshire.
* * *
A small valley enshrouded in thick fog emerges from the fuzzy pastiche below. I enter the mist, in thrall of the strange serenity provided by imminent death. But thin cotton candy-like tendrils quickly drag me back into panic, snagging at my limbs and torso, conglomerating, thickening, slowing my fall until I am sheathed in a man-sized Chinese finger trap, swaying gently upside down just above the forest floor.
I retch, reel off a string of joyous obscenities and retch again. Primal whoops of improbable triumph weave between dry heaves so intense that my blood-engorged skull feels as if it is entering Cro-Magnon territory.
At first I dismiss the peripheral scuttling as a mirage born of palpitating blood vessels and runoff bile, but when I palm-scrub the blurring slick from my eyes, I begin to doubt whether I’ve actually survived the fall.
An intricately personalized hell surrounds me: throngs of gypsy moth caterpillars—scientific name Lymantria dispar—squirm out from the surrounding gossamer veil to feast upon a viscous mélange of regurgitated Diet Coke, Snack Box number 2 and various gastric juices.
I am spackled into an egg mass so vast I cannot quite see its end in either direction. Hundreds of lesser sacs hang from its upper reaches, heavy with restless, churning larvae. Moths sporting wingspans the size of beach kites fly in and out of a pie-shaped opening near the top, scattering snatches of leaves onto their progeny below.
The caterpillars pyramid upward, scaling strands of hair to weigh down my thrashing head, overwhelming my wheezing efforts to blow off the squiggly, rising tide. I think of the PowerPoint presentation, in which I’d war-gamed for this very species, hurtling away on a laptop in an overhead bin a mile up.
Amidst the profound sensory deprivation, my consciousness blossoms; shifting patterns in the seething mass create a three-dimensional tableau upon which the saga of a gradual evolutionary journey slowly reveals itself. Through a deafening white noise rustle comes whispers of millennia spent trekking across Eurasia in search of elusive sustenance; of capture and a long, inexplicable voyage across the ocean in a mesh crate, raided often by malnourished deckhands; of the first pungent scent of the thick, forbidden foliage festooning an as-yet-unspoiled New World; and, yes, of Étienne Leopold Trouvelot—a French refugee from Napoleonic terror exiled to Medford, Massachusetts—oblivious to his impending destiny as he struggled to squeeze his fortune from the ass-end loom of the North American giant silkworm.
* * *
Trouvelot imported Lymantria dispar from Europe in hopes of crossbreeding away susceptibility to the microsporidian parasite Nosema bombycis, which had ravaged almost every batch of silkworms Trouvelot painstakingly raised on bark strips near the wood stove in his study. The gypsies, however, crawled over the silkworms with little chivalry.
And if a plate of leaves happened to be at stake?
The bulls of Pamplona have nothing on a famished gypsy moth caterpillar.
Three weeks into the failed experiment, Trouvelot sat locked in the makeshift cultivation chamber, drunkenly observing his segmented wards. Outside, his wife pounded on the door, demanding he apologize to his young son for a hellacious whipping Trouvelot had administered after he caught the boy using silkworms to lure blackbird
s to a windowsill.
“Forget the bottle and the switch and the bugs, Étienne, and go secure some gainful employment.”
Trouvelot took a long pull from his flask. “Damn to hell every Republican sentiment I ever uttered,” he said, “along with every last vile, puritanical caterpillar in this room.”
Trouvelot pinched a caterpillar and a silkworm between the fingers of either hand, and, alternately giggling and sobbing, forced a pantomime of obscene iterations of the human sex act. Halfway through a ménage a trios featuring two agitated caterpillars and a perhaps too-eager silkworm, Trouvelot flopped onto his back, unconscious. An oily fusion of bitter ale and pub stew filled his mouth and overflowed the cusp of his lips.
The silkworms beat a lumbering retreat off toward the shadows, impotent assholes twirling, while Lymantria dispar congregated next to Trouvelot mulling over the unfolding quandary. The man who paid for their enslavement and exile lay dying. Simple enough to let him vanquish himself. After all, who knew what sort of depraved experiments he might be plotting. Yet the amateur entomologist did just defend the silkworms against his own flesh and blood. He was their sole source of sustenance. And for all they knew, his widow might let her demented child torture them to death one by one, out of spite.
Thus did the scales of justice tip in Trouvelot’s favor.
One squad of gypsies spun egg mass straps across his forehead, another around the front legs of a nearby chair, then regrouped en masse on the back frame. The chair teetered but did not fall. The caterpillars cast imploring black gazes at the cowering silkworms and even sent an emissary to negotiate vague promises of limited future crossbreeding in return for aid, all to no avail.
Trouvelot’s skin darkened to a bruise-blue hue. The gypsies streamed back down onto the floor, rolling out in an undulating brown carpet. At its farthest reaches, the caterpillars bullied the plumpest silkworms onto its edge and sent them bobbing back to be herded up the wooden legs.
Savage Beasts Page 6
