by Del Howison
Harmony clamped her fingers over Sonny’s mouth, tore his flesh, and mashed his scream against his teeth.
“Be still,” she moaned.
The taste of blood filled Sonny with manic strength. He freed his right arm and struck her across the chin. Harmony brushed aside his attack, held him down as her face ran like heated wax.
“You want to be with me, fightin’ man?” the thing whispered. “I’ve been alone for soooo long.”
A white tongue the length of a man’s arm slid out of Harmony’s mouth and dived between Sonny’s lips, filling his mouth with the taste of ashes. He gagged, grasped the thick stalk, and bit down, trying to sever it.
Then something exploded in the hallway.
A high, bubbling scream pierced the red clouds in Sonny’s mind. Pain beat back the shadows in his head. Harmony withdrew the tongue and spun toward the sound as the front door exploded off its hinges.
Nomo staggered through the doorway, clutching at the red hole in the center of his chest. Then he fell behind the sofa and the Scrape stepped into the room.
“Dude,” Rifkin growled. “I’m gonna fuck-you-up.”
Indeed, the shotgun he carried—a twelve-gauge Mossberg Bullpup with a twenty-inch barrel and walnut pistol grip—testified to the whole congregation that Mama Rifkin’s baby boy had come to set things straight.
But playing spine-tag with Teflon-jacketed armor-piercing minimissiles was not on Harmony’s “to do” list that night. She fixed Rifkin with a glare that would have given Siberia terminal freezer bum.
“Put that down, Thomas,” she said.
Rifkin blinked, stumbled backward, and said “Daahh.”
Sonny noted the scraps of white powder clinging like fresh leprosy to Rifkin’s sad mustache: the Scrape had apparently snorted enough coke to make Condoleezza Rice sing “The Dreidel Song” at a Nation of Islam celebrity fundraiser.
“Shut up!” Rifkin howled. He lifted the Bullpup. “Me and Coco Chanel are callin’ the shots, y’hear?”
Whatever magical influence Harmony normally wielded was gone, cock-blocked by redneck rage and third-rate Peruvian go-go powder.
“Baby, I’m gonna kill you, then him, then myself if you don’t get up off him right now,” Rifkin said.
Harmony got up, leaving Sonny exposed with a German tank ventilator aimed at his sack.
Sonny got to his feet.
“Yeah, punk,” Rifkin crowed. “Ain’t no dodgin’ this smackdown. You feel me?”
Sonny nodded. “I feel you.”
Rifkin smirked. “Damn right, you washed-up mother—”
Sonny charged.
At the same time, Harmony grabbed the Bullpup by the barrel. Coco Chanel blasted a basketball-sized hole through the ceiling and scared the holy hell out of Mrs. Gupta-Sung-Jefferson, Sonny’s landlady, who lived upstairs.
Then Harmony grew a third arm.
Sonny braked hard as the stripper clutched the shotgun with her right hand, Rifkin’s throat in her left, and Rifkin’s balls with a third hand that was attached to the arm that extended out of her lower back.
Sonny’s headache reached down, pulled his lower lip over his head, and spiked it to the nape of his neck: his bad eye was transmitting a sight that a man fighting to stay sober should miss. Something like a cross between Beyoncé Knowles and Kali the Hindu Goddess of Destruction was giving Rifkin the nightmare “reach-around” of all time.
Sonny’s left eye, however, still perceived Harmony as she’d been back at the Shakedown: somehow, luscious dancer and tongue-raping grief freak were one and the same.
“Please—give it back,” Rifkin whispered.
Harmony dug her nails into Rifkin’s throat. In seconds, stripper and slinger were covered in blood.
Harmony’s tongue lashed out and double-wrapped itself around Rifkin’s throat. Rifkin turned purple and Coco Chanel clattered to the floor. Harmony hoisted the Scrape over her head and body-slammed him hard enough to crack Sonny’s synthetic wood floor. Then she shook him until his mullet sprinkled white flakes like a snowstorm over Minneapolis.
An evil sound issued from Rifkin’s backbone—
Crack!
—and his foot shot out and kicked the shotgun across the room. Coco Chanel slid to a halt at Sonny’s feet.
Harmony dropped Rifkin while Sonny retrieved the shotgun. And before even he understood that he’d made his choice, she pounced, her face melting as she came for him.
Coco Chanel coughed and punched Harmony in the throat. The stripper struck the far wall and stuck. Sonny had five seconds to realize that he had not been dismembered; then Harmony slithered up the wall and disappeared in a patch of shadow near the ceiling.
Then the lights went out.
“Shit!” Sonny hissed.
He spun, trying to separate the woman from the shadows over his head. Then, sound, a sensation like a million fire ants strip mining his bones, filled the air. Something in Sonny’s head ripped open, and blood filled his bad eye. He screamed and dropped Coco Chanel.
The hag-thing dropped out of the shadows and landed on his back. Sonny windmilled around the room, smashed into the walls, knocked over furniture trying to dislodge her.
“One way or another, fightin’ man,” she hissed.
Pain detonated against Sonny’s spine as her tongue pierced the skin at the base of his skull. The tongue burrowed, widening the tear in his flesh.
Gotta stop her, boy! Sharkey shouted. Sonny felt the tongue shudder, a sandpaper rasp against his backbone.
“Stop her, booyyy,” Harmony said.
Sonny dropped to his knees.
The shotgun lay a few feet away. Sonny reached for it and fell on his face. The thing on his back plunged its proboscis deeper.
Sleep, the Troub thought. Be nice to just lay down.
Don’t be stupid, Sharkey argued. You lay down now and whatever’s left to get up, it won’t be Sonny Troubadour.
And because he knew Sharkey was right, Sonny stretched out his right hand, his joints creaking, and reached for the gun. Something in his shoulder popped and gave way: Sonny stretched further, touched cool wood … and snagged it.
He rammed Coco Chanel up and over his left shoulder, felt the barrel penetrate soft flesh a second before he pulled the trigger. Then Coco Chanel spat thunder and hag-slapped Harmony across the room.
Sonny leapt to his feet, his breath a dry heave, his bad eye sifting the darkness. Harmony lay against the doorjamb, her face a ruin. Her stiletto heels gouged twin ruts into the floor as she pushed herself halfway up. Then she uttered a thick grunt, and the back of her head dragged a red arc down the wall.
The lights flickered back on a second later.
Sonny touched the wound on the back of his neck and winced. Then he went to check on Rifkin.
Sonny had seen dead before, but the Scrape made Latin look lively. He looked like a man who’d slipped in a puddle of discount tomato paste, suffered a heart attack, and shat himself before dying from terminal embarrassment.
Sonny watched the last of his five-thousand-plus-expenses soak into the floorboards of the apartment he could no longer afford.
Then the Scrape sat up.
“That hurt, you bitch!” he hollered.
Sonny joined in: the two of them screamed like Billy Graham and Charlton Heston at a prison gangbang.
“Dude, you’re freakin’ me out!” Rifkin said.
Sonny shut his trap.
“Vials,” Rifkin said.
“Huh?” Sonny said back.
“Crystal vials. You didn’t blow them up, did you?”
Harmony slumped against the wall like a blow-up doll whose glory days have come and gone. A single vial lay nestled in the petrified valley of counterfeit cleavage rapidly deflating beneath her bloody halter top.
Sonny heard that tiny scream again, clearer this time.
It was coming from inside the vial.
“Well?” the Scrape said.
“One of ’em is gone,” Son
ny said. “The other one is—”
“Shit! Shit! Shit!” Rifkin banged his fist on the floor, each expletive provoking a mushy pop from his backbone. Then his spine gave way with a soggy lurch and his torso compacted a full two inches: Rifkin folded like an all-black revival of Oklahoma and slammed face-first into the floor.
Sonny’s guts did the Hokey-Pokey, and he let fly for the second time that night.
Outside, car doors slammed. The police probably wouldn’t bother to show up till sometime in the early A.G. (After Gentrification), however, so no one was worried about them getting in the way.
Rifkin pushed himself up onto his knuckles and glared at Sonny from a vast puddle of blood.
“Bring that shit over here, goddamit,” he snapped.
Then one of his hands slipped, and he fell on his face.
Sonny heard the crack, but he didn’t believe it.
“Owww!” Rifkin screamed. “By dose!”
Sonny wiped his chin and zipped up his pants.
“You’re pathetic,” he said.
“Hey!” the Scrape shouted at the floor. “I’b dot bayin’ you da backdalk me, dickwad!”
“Keep your damn money, man,” Sonny said. “Just pull yourself together and get out.”
Rifkin snorted. “Hey, genius, I’d love do, but she broke by friggin’ deck and I can’d ged ub!”
“Sounds like a personal problem,” Sonny said.
Rifkin screamed. The lightbulb over Sonny’s head flickered.
“All right, look,” the Scrape snapped. “There’s half a million dollars cash in by trunk. Gib me the vial and it’s yours.”
Sonny’s brow furrowed. “What’s in it?”
Rifkin rolled over and spoke to the ceiling.
“Harmony feeds off the real part of a man, the part that means you. She keeps it stashed in those vials.”
Some kinda fucked-up testosterone vampire, Sharkey grunted. Like my first wife.
“She told me that without my essence I’m doomed to wander the earth forever,” Rifkin said. “Like the living dead, or the Wandering Hebrew or some shit like that.”
Man gave you a second chance, Son, Sharkey opined.
Sonny cursed the day he let Sharkey lift him out of the gutter. Then he tossed the vial to Rifkin, who thumbed it open and inhaled like Marion Berry on a new crack pipe.
“Mmmmhe murmured. “Guess one’s as good as another. Right, Troub?”
A second later, however, Rifkin shot to his feet, clutched his head, and painted the air with a fusillade of the finest Japanese profanity since Emperor Hirohito woke up on that fateful morning in 1945 and read in the Tokyo Sun that his monthly golf trip to Hiroshima had been postponed.
The Scrape made a sound like a yellow cat being strategically peeled. Then Mrs. Rifkin’s gift to the dope trade fell dead to the floor.
Something flitted at the edge of Sonny’s vision. He whirled, Coco Chanel at the ready.
Harmony’s body was gone: The rump-shaker from Planet X had returned to the Great Beyond.
* * *
When Sonny stepped onto the sidewalk, he was greeted by half of the Samoan National Sumo Wrestling Team. Tokomatsu’s men were pointing enough firepower to repel the French Navy at Sonny’s Afro.
Tokomatsu stepped forward, his left hand raised.
“She dead?” he said.
“Don’t know,” Sonny said.
“Mmmmph,” Tokomatsu grunted. “Rifkin dead?”
“Yup,” Sonny said.
The Samoans observed a moment of silence. Then Tokomatsu hawked and spat on the sidewalk.
“Well, that’s somethin’,” he said.
Sonny noted that Tokomatsu avoided making eye contact. Testing a theory, he took a small step forward. Tokomatsu winced and took a step back.
The Samoans rumbled, and Sonny recalled that Rifkin had imbibed Tokomatsu’s essence before he kicked.
“You saw,” Tokomatsu whispered. “You saw what she was.”
Sonny shook his head. “I don’t know.”
Tokomatsu considered his shoes. Then he shrugged.
“Yeah, brah,” he said. “I don’t think nobody knows.”
And Sonny recognized the new thing in Tokomatsu’s voice. It was the same thing he’d heard in Rifkin’s voice the day before: the Flinch.
Tokomatsu glanced over his shoulder. “I could kill you now,” he said. “You know?”
Sonny nodded. “I know.”
Tokomatsu nodded. “I could use an intrepid brother such as yourself on my team,” he said. “You want a job?”
Sonny took a deep breath. “Thanks,” he said. “But I got some schemes working.”
Tokomatsu shrugged. “All right then.”
The two men shook hands. Sonny even managed a smile.
“All right then,” he said.
But his gaze never wavered from the back of Rifkin’s Cadillac, still idling at the curb.
TYLER’S THIRD ACT
MICK GARRIS
IT HAD BEEN sneaking up on me since Entertainment went online, but I guess the beginning of my end came with the Writers Guild strike in 2007. Not that I was a total Luddite; I did all my script work on an iMac, browsed my e-mails over hot green tea every morning, watched a couple of the funny videos that some other writers had forwarded to me. But if they were more than a couple of minutes long, I just couldn’t pay attention to the little window on the monitor. It’s hard for me to enjoy movies in miniature.
Why had I shelled out over ten grand for a new Pioneer plasma screen, upgraded uncompressed sound, and the whole Blu-ray thing, anyway? So I could watch a YouTube home video of some pudgy, pimpled adolescent acting out his Jedi Knight fantasies, blown up to sixty inches of stuttering, cubist blocks?
No. I love movies, even if they’re on television; movies have scale and scope and an emotional investment in stories and characters. Yeah, yeah, I know all about that whole “convergence” thing, but it hasn’t happened yet. I’m not going to watch Lawrence of Arabia on my iPhone, thank you very much. Movies are made for the big screen, and if it can’t be a sixty-foot screen, sixty inches can still make due. Three point five won’t cut it for me.
All right, I tend to digress. I promise not to lecture a couple of generations who can’t pay attention to a film if it’s not in full, blazing color. If you can find joy in homegrown cell phone movies rather than the craftsmanship of the best of Hollywood’s greatest technicians, well, I feel sorry for you, but the planet keeps turning. If cavemen had developed camcorders before cave paintings, there never would have been a need to write or paint to communicate; they’d have sent video of their latest kills instead.
Bitter? Hell no, not me.
But after the strike ended in 2008, my world, if not the state of photographed drama, changed for good, and that was bad. The great unwashed, uneducated, undead masses discovered reality TV in greater numbers than ever before, and rushed like lemmings to leap from the cliff of scripted dramatic entertainment. They hibernated to their computers and PlayStations, evacuating the cinemas and home theaters, their eyes fluttering in unfixed attention-deficited fragmentation, Blackberried and text-messaged to the point of cranial vacuousness. If it required brainpower, it was abandoned for a quick barrage on a tiny, portable screen: a snack, a punchline in search of a joke.
But like I said, the world turns with or without me, spinning into oblivion, choking on its own dust. Ashes to ashes, and all that shit.
When we emerged at long last from the noble fight against the studios and the producers, our Nikes worn thin as we marched obediently across the studio entrances, the viewing public had lost interest in my line of work. Life before the strike was remunerative, if repetitive, going into the second season as a staff writer on Letting Blood, a medical procedural on NBC that reveled in the viscera of forensic investigation and the hot young personalities behind it. Okay, hard to make a case for art in the sea of commerce, but still … better than a YouTube video of a colonoscopy, right?
So Letting Blood was put to a painless death, and the Nielsen families had either adopted the babies of reality or abandoned network television, never to return. While the networks, panicking to find they’d been forsaken by the brood they had so abused, tried in vain to find the lowest possible denominator to reach out to them, they were as savvy to the ways of the modern world as the soon-to-be-retired idiot president from Texas, and they, too, found their world collapsing.
Scripted series were still produced, but they were broadcast to the vast darkness of outer space, perhaps to be viewed eons in the future by multi-eyed alien lifeforms with perplexed interest in life on the primitive third planet from the sun. Even the successful creators of series and their showrunners struck out repeatedly with their pitches; new series from the prophetic geniuses of seasons past crashed and burned with an industry that collapsed in an operatic prelude to the 2008 housing industry and financial markets.
Sure, basic cable had a measure of scripted successes, but their audiences, as well as their paychecks, were minuscule by comparison. Only the self-congratulatory Emmy Awards noticed them.
So when work was available at all, which was increasingly rare, it was at a greatly reduced rate. No one was making the big dollars of just a year or two before. Even the feature film business was teetering: illicit downloads and gaming took over from the box-office figures that only a year earlier had reached record levels. The only way to get your movie green-lit was to anchor it to a star … but even that was no guarantee. And the indie market that had so powerfully reawakened with Little Miss Sunshine and Juno and other low-cost, big-box office Cinderella stories had collapsed in narcoleptic slumber.
