“A club stamp,” she says, pointing to a blurry mark on the webbing between the woman’s thumb and forefinger. “For Chiaroscuro.”
“The club over by the river?” Voodoo says, squinting at the screen, the image jittering as the tape head tries to hold onto the frame.
“I remember. I think I remember going there.”
“To that dive? What the hell for?”
And she turns to him, her eyes bloodshot and rimmed with dark shadows but alive with the reflection of the video footage. “Because I wanted to feel loved,” she says.
Each of those ahead of her hold out their hand to the man and he takes the money they hold in it then presses a small stamp onto their skin before letting them into the building.
When Jess reaches the front he grabs her hand, his eyes hidden behind the dark glasses he wears, then he stops.
“Okay,” he says, waving her in without taking her money and when she looks at her hand she sees that there is already a stamp there, just as there had been on the tape, but smudged and faded.
Inside, fast and menacing drum and bass fills the place, the crowd instantly swarming around her, drawing her in so that she quickly loses her bearings. The club lights strobe, turning the people into stuttering multi-coloured creatures which flick in and out of existence until she sees a figure drifting towards her. Lit from behind he is nothing but shadow, slightly stooped. Fear blossoms with her and she has to fight her way clear as consciousness threatens to elude her.
She staggers towards the toilets, the looped sample of a woman groaning in pleasure or agony now playing over the music. Jess bursts into the toilets and dives into a cubicle, pulling the door shut behind her.
Slumped across the seat, her breathing is ragged and she is soaked in sweat. The vomit comes quickly and easily then she closes her eyes, trying to shut everything out until she reorders it all into something which makes sense. The music thrums through the walls like a heartbeat.
A gasp comes from one of the other cubicles. A woman’s sigh, a moan, then the soft slap-slapping of sex. Jess breathes deeply, rocking back and forth. She starts to cry. She clutches a hand to her mouth to try and stop herself but the sadness forces it’s way out as easily as the vomit had. The fucking sounds grow quicker, more desperate.
Then through the tears she notices words scrawled on the cubicle wall in lipstick.
Open the door.
The bathroom lights flicker, making the words seem alive.
Her breathing slows and she stands up. The other woman’s groans continue, deep and shivering, she whimpers. Jess pushes the door open.
Beyond it is dark and quiet, the music gone but the sounds of sex still there. Jess steps out of the cubicle and into the darkness.
Then figures become visible, two people entwined before her on a bed. The woman lies on her stomach, the man on top of her, and she arches her back as he slides in and out. He grips her hair with one hand, pressing his face into the back of her neck.
Jess tries to see his features but they are distorted by the hood he wears and the couple’s now-frantic movements. The woman clutches the sheets and then she looks up at Jess and Jess watches herself, watches the woman. Jess adjusts the focus on the camera she holds.
Everything is reaching a crescendo, the sex becoming quicker and louder, Jess crying again, the tears flowing, draining her of everything inside. Jess tries to scream but the only sound that comes out is the thick and growling static of an empty broadcast.
THE DROWSY MAN DREAMS
NICK MAMATAS
The air in the Rucksack Truckstop and Diner is gray, grainy. It sizzles. That’s how it looks to Laura. Even Elmer, standing before her on the other side of the Formica countertop, hands at his sides as if waiting for a cue, shimmers as if constructed from extra-large molecules. His nameplate reads ELMER. Between them, a cigarette burns in an ashtray. It is Laura’s. It’s easy enough for us to imagine her smoking all the time, a pair of giant lips and nothing else. She looks down at the cigarette, then up at Elmer.
“What’ll it be?” Elmer says. He swings his hands into the pockets of his apron—they are large hands, small pockets—and then raises his pad and golf pencil to his chest.
“I want a coffee. Black as a moonless midnight.” Laura smiles. She has a crooked smile. A faded scar run from the corner of her mouth, up her left cheek. “And I want somebody killed.”
“One,” Elmer says as he writes, “coffee.” When he returns with the coffee, in a white cup, on a white saucer, he looks at Laura expectantly. His eyes are huge. They could fill a wall. The bloodshot streaks pulse as he speaks, his voice lower now. “And who is it?”
Laura flicks her chin, sending the wayward hair of her wet bangs away from her forehead. “There is a man.”
A pair of headlamps tear down a highway, burning orange. Either side of the road is desolate, just short of desert. A factory of brick and tombstone windows appears in the reflection of the windshield, crawling over the curve of the glass. There is a driver in the car. He is a young man, who looks even younger than he must be. Like a girl dressed as a boy. He turns to his passenger. Another man. Older. Pock-marked. Teeth wide as fingernails. He is smiling.
“I can smell it, Jim,” says the wide-toothed man.
“You can smell him, Todd,” Jim says. Jim turns to the window, and depresses a button. The window lowers into the well of the driver’s side door of the car and Jim inhales richly. “That’s him. Flour, and vanilla, and bananas, and pussy. Dried pussy flakes. Out there in the dark.”
“You’re a dirty-minded son-of-a-gun,” Todd says. His voice is like rough pebbles. He grins, jogs his shoulders in a silent cackle.
Jim leans on the steering wheel. The horn blares and doesn’t stop blaring. Just one long long blare. Todd howls and raises his arms and clenches his fists and howls again, then his howling collapses into a sputtering cough. Jim lets up on the horn.
There is a shadow in the swirling pool of headlamp light. There is a shadow stepping toward the car. There is a shadow, and it shuffles slowly. Another few, painful steps and the shadow falls away from a man. The man rests his palms on the hood of the car and squints at Jim and Todd inside. He is wearing a blue-collared jumpsuit. He yawns, and puts a fist to his mouth, then puts that hand back on the hood of the car.
“It’s the Night Shift!” Todd leans over Jim, his big shoulder jamming the little man into his seat. Jim smacks at Todd ineffectually, then struggles with the seat belt pulled taut against his neck. “Night Shift!” Todd shouts again, his head worming out the window. “Gimme a freebie! Gimme a freebie!” The Night Shift smiles and raises a finger then reaches behind his back and from a rear pocket withdraws a cellophane-wrapped pink snack cake. He throws it underhand, and Todd half-lurches out of the car window to catch it. Jim, crushed against his seat, wriggles around and smacks at Todd’s broad back again. Todd slides back into his own seat and struggles with the cellophane. The man fills the open window of the car and peers at Jim as the young man arranges his suit jacket, smoothes his necktie.
“That fellah sure enjoys his riboflavin,” the man Todd called the Night Shift says. Todd peeks up from his snack cake. His lips are on the corner of the pink blob. He goes back to nibbling it, daintily.
“He likes to make them last,” Jim says to the Night Shift. “But everything goes away in the end.”
“That’s true,” the Night Shift says. He casts a glance over at the factory. “Once upon a time, third shift had two hundred souls, every night, singin’ and a dancin’, filling cakes with cream filling. Banana filling. Chocolate filling. Raspberry thrilling.”
“All things must end,” Jim says.
“It’s just me now,” the Night Shift says. “Just me and the machines. I pull a lever at 8 pm, and watch the old girl go hog wild, hog wild in her guts, all night long, till 5:55 am.”
“Guts,” Todd says, his mouth full of cream, his lips flecked with pink. “Cream filling!”
The Night Shift r
uns his fingers through his hair. He looks at the ground. He sighs, deflating. “Well boys, it was real nice for you to come out all this way and visit with me, but I have to get back to work now. There’s a lot of work that needs doing.” He takes a step back and stands tall. Without saying goodbye, Jim puts the car in reverse and drives away from Night Shift. Todd reaches over to the steering wheel and honks the horn again, quick bleats. Jim swings the car around, the headlamps huge spotlights throwing spidered shadows across the wasted landscape, then guns the engine and the car roars into the night. The Night Shift turns and walks down the highway, right on the yellow lines.
Jeremy’s hands hover above the keyboard. He’s in a cubicle, between two other cubicles. The world buzzes fluorescent blue. Someone is snoring loudly. Jeremy stands up and raises himself to his tip-toes. His cubicle is one among many. The large room the cubicles are in looks itself much like a cubicle. It’s a roaring snore, thick and buttery, coming from the depths of a face very much unlike Jeremy’s. Jeremy’s face is narrow, hawklike. His nose is prominent, his brows heavy. He frowns at the snore of a heavy man, somewhere, in some cubicle nearby. Jeremy leaves his cubicle. He plays with the cuffs of his button-down shirt—it’s the lightest pink, with white cuffs and collar—as he stalks the aisle between cubicles, poking his head into one after another. He walks down a second aisle and spots something on the floor. His eyes go wide. There’s a woman on the floor, curled into a ball and weeping. She’s in a business suit. Her legs are huge in her finely creased pink pants. She has a fancy handkerchief to her face. She’s leaning against the exterior wall of the cubicle.
Jeremy walks up to her, stares down at her, waits for her to look up at him. She blinks away the tears, looks at him expectantly. “There’s a man,” she hisses, sotto voce, “in my cubicle.” The snoring is very loud now. Jeremy strains to hear the woman at his feet, because of the very loud snoring.
“Tell him to leave,” Jeremy says.
“I can’t. He’s asleep.”
“You stay here.” Jeremy takes a step into the cubicle. There are little toys scattered about, pink picture frames and pictures of smiling black children in the frames. The Night Shift sleeps in the chair, still in his blue jumpsuit, his head resting in his folded-up arms. We notice this last, because it’s out of place. Not like the photo of the sobbing woman, and a man, standing next to one another under the brightest blue sky we ever saw.
Jeremy taps the Night Shift on the shoulder. “Wake up. Wake up, sir. This is not a homeless shelter, this is a place of business.” He shakes the Night Shift’s shoulder roughly. “Get up!” Jeremy growls when he says those two words. He finds an r somewhere in the word get and says it again. “Get up!”
The Night Shift stirs. He raises his head, looks up at Jeremy. We can imagine the Night Shift looking at us. The Night Shift looks a little confused, like Jeremy seems familiar.
“What did you say?” the Night Shift says.
“Get out now, please. You have to go.”
“Pardon me for asking,” the Night Shift says. “You have awoken me from an incomplete nap. My lexical recall and verbal comprehension suffer when I’m newly awake.”
“Well . . .” Jeremy pauses for a moment. His eyebrows are practically a V-shape on his face. “I am very sorry to hear that.”
“Hear that?”
There’s the slightest twipsp of a sound. Jeremy inhales sharply. He looks down at his shirt. It’s raspberry red with blood, sticking to his belly. He falls against the wall of the woman’s cubicle, throws out an arm, knocks a picture from a shelf as he sinks to the floor. The Night Shift groans as he rises from the chair. There’s a gun in his hand, a silencer on the gun. He shuffles as he walks his first step, slaps his thigh like his leg has fallen asleep. Jeremy gurgles, and jerks once. The woman is up, her pink pantsuit blocking the cubicle entrance.
“Sorry ma’am,” the Night Shift says in the midst of a yawn. He gestures with the gun. There is another twipsp. He shoots her in her sizeable bosom. She clutches at her chest, falls to the floor. The Night Shift stumbles a bit as he navigates around her body. There’s a general murmur washing over the scene. A head pops out of a cubicle, then back down, as the Night Shift walks toward the exit. The Night Shift stops at the kitchenette, pours himself one third of one second’s worth of coffee from the pot into a paper cup. He opens the glass door to the office with his back, gun raised in one hand, coffee cup in the other. He yawns again as he leaves, and walks slowly away.
Laura does that trick with her bangs again. She smiles. She has crow’s feet around her eyes. They’re beautiful blue eyes. The room she’s in now is featureless. It’s so dark behind her that, all we can see is those eyes, the white of her nose, a gray finger of smoke from her cigarette. If there’s light, it’s shining from somewhere behind our own heads. She smiles and begins to speak.
“When I was a young girl, I had so many dreams. And such a loving family too. My grandpa always used to take me to the little luncheonette by the dog track. We drove past several other diners to get there, because he said this particular luncheonette had the best milkshakes in the tri-state area. I believed it too. Grandpa would tell me that if you have a lot of problems in your life, have yourself a milkshake. If you do, it’ll be a respite from the hornets in your mind. If a body is capable of sitting upright and enjoying a milkshake, even if said body spent her last three dollars in the world to get it, things can’t be so bad. I believed him. To this day, I believe in my grandpa’s wisdom.
“One time, in my hometown, I went to a show in an old movie house. They’d torn out the screen, but kept the stage and the thick red velvet curtains. It was a Punch and Judy show, but with real actors, not puppets. Mr. Punch laid into Judy real hard with a big wax baseball bat, and then when she moved no more, he said ‘Get up! Get up I say!’ over her body. Then he declared, ‘Well then, get down.’ And he kicked her into the orchestra pit. Rolled her right in, with a thump. Then all these lights came on, all pink and blue and swirly, beautiful and terrible.” And lights she just described come on, just like that, so pink they’re white, so blue they’re white, then they die down again.
Laura has changed position in her chair. She’s older now too. The cigarette in her lips has burned down to the filter. She keeps her lips pursed, speaks around the filter in her mouth. “I had an angel once. A holy guardian angel. It saved me once, in college, from three men with evil on their minds with its great black claws and teeth like knives of ice. Then the angel turned to me, with its one hundred fiery eyes, and told me that everybody gets one. Just one. Since then, I’ve been on my own. Every time I fuck, I’m on my own. That’s how I feel about it, anyways.” She flicks the remnant of the cigarette over her shoulder, into the shadows behind her. We sit on the other side of the desk and nod, and reach for our own cigarette pack, our own Zippo lighter. We’ve been practicing. We flick the Zippo with a practiced flichyt and light her another one.
“We all get one,” a slight voice says. It sounds like Jim’s, but far away. “And we used it,” another, rougher voice says. And it sounds like Todd’s, but far away.
“Thanks,” Laura says—her smile is a thirty-foot wide streak of light, at an aspect ratio of one point eight-five to one.
TEATRO GROTTESCO
THOMAS LIGOTTI
The first thing I learned was that no one anticipates the arrival of the Teatro. One would not say, or even think, “The Teatro has never come to this city—it seems we’re due for a visit,” or perhaps, “Don’t be surprised when you-know-what turns up. It’s been years since the last time.” Even if the city in which one lives is exactly the kind of place favored by the Teatro, there can be no basis for predicting its appearance. No warnings are given, no fanfare to announce that a Teatro season is about to begin, or that another season of that sort will soon be upon us. But if a particular city possesses what is sometimes called an “artistic underworld,” and if one is in close touch with this society of artists, the chances are optimal
for being among those who discover that things have already started. This is the most one can expect.
For a time it was all rumors and lore, hearsay and dreams. Anyone who failed to show up for a few days at the usual club or bookstore or special artistic event was the subject of speculation. But most of the crowd I am referring to led highly unstable, even precarious lives. Any of them might have packed up and disappeared without notifying a single soul. And almost all of the supposedly “missing ones” were, at some point, seen again. One such person was a filmmaker whose short movie Private Hell served as the featured subject of a local one-night festival. But he was nowhere to be seen either during the exhibition or at the party afterwards. “Gone with the Teatro,” someone said with a blasé knowingness, while others smiled and clinked glasses in a sardonic farewell toast.
Yet only a week later the filmmaker was spotted in one of the back rows of a pornographic theater. He later explained his absence by insisting he had been in the hospital following a thorough beating at the hands of some people he had been filming but who did not consent or desire to be filmed. This sounded plausible, given the subject matter of the man’s work. But for some reason no one believed his hospital story, despite the evidence of bandages he was still required to wear. “It has to be the Teatro,” argued a woman who always dressed in shades of purple and who was a good friend of the filmmaker. “His stuff and Teatro stuff,” she said, holding up two crossed fingers for everyone to see.
But what was meant by “Teatro stuff”? This was a phrase I heard spoken by a number of persons, not all of them artists of a pretentious or self-dramatizing type. Certainly there is no shortage of anecdotes that have been passed around which purport to illuminate the nature and workings of this “cruel troupe,” an epithet used by those who are too superstitious to invoke the Teatro Grottesco by name. But sorting out these accounts into a coherent profile, never mind their truth value, is another thing altogether.
In Heaven, Everything Is Fine: Fiction Inspired by David Lynch Page 34
