The Crooked God Machine

by Autumn Christian

  “Do you love me, Charles?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said, “I love you.”

  “Then why couldn't you get it up?”

  “Jeanine,” I said, rising from the bed. I wanted her to look at me, look straight through me, like she did that time when she took me into her meat freezer – when she printed her fingernails into the hollow of my throat and suffocated me between her butterfly wings.

  When she whispered, “if there were stars here they would be your eyes.”

  But instead the stars outside the window caught her face in their claws and the sky threatened to pull her under. She shivered as she walked toward the window. I noticed for the first time she was barefooted, and the soles of her feet were blackened and scorched raw.

  “Jeanine?”

  “The swans are dead,” she said, “and I'm leaving.”

  I tried to catch her before she left, but before I could reach her she crawled through the window and leaped down into the darkness below. She sprinted off into the woods, and then she was gone.

  I chased after her. I ran down the stairs past Momma and Sissy on the couch and out the door and into the waiting arms of the swamp. I ran through the trees and the mud opened its mouths to suck me down.

  “Jeanine!” I called out, but only the wolves and the plague machines answered in response.

  I ran to her meat freezer and found the door unlocked. The butterfly wings and the suits of skin were gone. Nothing remained except the industrial whir of the freezer fans and the congealing puddles of blood stuck to the floor where the meat costumes used to hang and drip above.

  So I ran to Jeanine's home and knocked on the door. I heard Jeanine’s mother drag herself in her wheelchair across the house, to the foyer, and then to the door.

  “Who is it?” she asked behind the door.

  “It’s Charles,” I said, “do you remember me?”

  “Which one are you?” she asked.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said, “Is Jeanine there?”

  “Jeanine’s not home,” she said through the bottom slit of the door, “she won’t be coming back. Just like her brother. He’s a prophet, you know. At the capitol.”

  “Yes,” I said, “I know.”

  “If you find her ask her if she knows how her brother's doing,” she said.

  “And Jeanine?” I asked.

  “That girl can go to hell.”

  “Okay,” I said, “okay,”

  “I think you better leave,” she said.

  “Wait,” I said, my voice a whisper, but her wheelchair scraped backwards against the floor and she wouldn’t speak to me anymore.

  I went to the rock quarry where Jeanine used to watch over her swans and record their names and births in her scratched black book. I found the rock quarry empty, and I could hear no movement below.

  I climbed down the sandstone face of the quarry and found all the swans dead. They floated on the surface of the stained mirror waters with broken necks and open white wings bubbling over with black blood. Their soft heads were peeled back, split open, skulls exposed. Their reflections looked up at me from the surface of the water with sad and star filled eyes. I looked for the man of smoke that Jeanine told me she found in the dark places, but I only saw those eyes.

  Chapter Ten

  Sissy didn't seem surprised Jeanine left me.

  “That girl was the worst kind of whore,” Sissy said, “The kind with crazy dreams.”

  “She’s not a whore,” I said, “she won’t take money for it.”

  But at that point, Sissy wasn’t listening to me anymore.

  “I mean,” she continued, “an archaeologist? Please. Nobody's an archaeologist anymore. Nobody cares.”

  Sissy searched through my closet for more dead animals. I sat on the bed, wearing Daddy's leather jacket with Jeanine's spit in my mouth and the taste of butterfly meat on my tongue.

  “I’ll never find anyone like her again,” I said.

  “Cheer up,” Sissy said, “you're always so melodramatic. Nobody cares. Do you think Momma put a moose head in here?”

  “Why don't you ask Momma yourself?” I asked.

  Sissy laughed.

  “Maybe there's an owl, if there isn't a moose. An owl would be okay. I've been looking for something to put above the kitchen table.”

  She pulled out boxes of Daddy's old belongings from my closet and dumped them out onto the floor. She sifted through his clothes, his glass pipes, his button beads and rolling jars of formaldehyde.

  Momma walked up the stairs in her heavy, shuffle stomp walk. She came into my bedroom and halted at the foot of my bed.

  “Afraid to blow your head out of the water, Charles?” she asked, “you don't feel a thing.”

  “Get out of here, Momma,” Sissy said. She threw a gold-edged button at Momma. It bounced off her head and rolled down into a crack through the floor. Momma didn't move.

  “Come join me,” Momma said, “you don't feel a thing at all.”

  “She says the same damn thing every night,” Sissy said.

  “Yeah,” I said quietly.

  “What's with you?” Sissy asked, “are you still sobbing over that girl? Give it up.”

  “Give it up, Charles,” Momma said in a grated, machine voice.

  Sissy laughed.

  I looked at Sissy, kneeling on the floor over Daddy's belongings, and I thought for a moment the house turned her into another piece of angry furniture – as if the house sucked up what she used to be, the girl that gave flowers to strangers, that girl who gave Daddy a glass of lemonade in exchange for all the secrets of gardening and life – and spit out a bad shell in her place.

  I said, “you know you're just like Momma. Even without the slip. You act just like her.”

  Sissy paused. Her fingers shook. She stood up and turned toward me, her face stretched and still. The heat rushed out of her body and infused the room.

  “Bubba,” she said, calling me by that name for the first time in twelve years, “Bubba, you have no idea.”

  The next time I saw Sissy she hung on the arm of one of the doctors with his gray valise. The doctor handed me Sissy's slip papers and a pamphlet about Sissy's “new and glorious life” as Sissy crawled across the floor toward the television with her billowing hospital dress clinging to uprooted nails, her knuckles scraping frantic patterns against the rotted wood. As she crawled she chewed against her bottom lip and I thought she might chew it completely off. Her eyes hid underneath her nesting hair, but her hair could not hide the hot wire spider's clicking motions against her brain.

  Sissy lay in front of the television and twitched as God in his black mask screamed.

  “I know what you're thinking,” the doctor said.

  I turned toward him.

  “In the woods. There's a sinkhole about a ten minute walk from here. Just give her a good push.”

  He winked at me. Then he left me standing alone at the open door.

  Sissy twitched and genuflected in front of the television. I knelt down beside her. I stroked her hair and kissed her on the forehead like she used to kiss me.

  “I’m sorry for what I said to you,” I said, “I’m sorry for everything I ever said to you.”

  The hot wire spider inside her brain clicked furiously at me until Sissy cried out in pain.

  That night Sissy joined Momma in her nightly advertisements at the foot of my bed.

  “Come join us, Charles,” Sissy said.

  Outside in the swamp Jolene screamed. The plague machines brought a hurricane that knocked over the tree outside my bedroom window, driving its knife-edged, roped branches through the glass. The shattered glass flew with the storm wind across the room, lifting up Momma's and Sissy's skirts and slicing up their faces and ankles

  “You're hurt,” I said as their blood pooled at their feet, “oh God, look at you, you're hurt.”

  They remained still.

  “You don't feel a thing, Bubba,” Sissy said.

  A
s the hurricane raged through my room, she smiled.

  Part Two: Seven Years Later

  Chapter One

  Crouchy built a hot air balloon and tried to float off the side of the planet before death found him. Ezekiel and I went to Crouchy’s house in town to watch him cut the balloon tether tied to the roof off his house. When we got there, a small crowd was already on the lawn underneath his house to watch the ceremony and to take bets on how long before he’d crash.

  The red balloon sagged against the roof tiles Crouchy stood on top of the roof about to get into the small, wicker basket of his hot air balloon. Crouchy looked out over the crowd below his house and waved with triumph.

  “I’ll see you on the other side!” he called out, and smiled with his jowly cat face.

  “I don’t even want to tell you what’s about to happen to him,” Ezekiel told me, “this is just fucking sad.”

  In seven years Ezekiel hadn't changed much – he still maintained his sociopathically slick good looks and curly black hair and his perpetual boredom syndrome. Yet the sphere in his head got angrier as the years passed, and Ezekiel's body turned warped and lean to accommodate it, as if he was no longer so much a person but a vessel for the hard lined voice inside the pupiless black eye.

  Crouchy climbed into his hot air balloon, took out a rusted silver dirk from his jacket pocket, and cut the rope. The crowd below watched in an anorexic silence as he and the red hot air balloon rose up into the air. The balloon heaved upwards in a lazy suspension. Then it started to float away toward the east, with the wind. It floated out past the temple, past the slip clinic, past the grocery store and the execution equipment in the main square.

  “I should’ve just stayed home,” Ezekiel said.

  “I don’t know,” I said, “he might actually make it.”

  “Hot air balloons aren’t God approved technology,” Ezekiel said, “he won’t.”

  I knew that Ezekiel was right before he even spoke. As the hot air balloon approached the woods behind Edgewater the trees appeared to coil upwards in response. They were trees made out of daggers, silvery and buffeted, heat resistant, nearly immortal. The closer Crouchy got to the woods, the further the needles of the trees reached. I braced myself.

  The hot air balloon crashed into the trees.

  The wicker basket tipped over and Crouchy fell into the woods below. I couldn’t hear the crash, or Crouchy’s inevitable scream. Only silence. Even the crowd watching the spectacle appeared subdued, looking at the ground or covering their mouths with their hands.

  “Yep. He’s dead,” Ezekiel said, “he should’ve taken the bus. Come on. Let’s get out of here.”

  Ezekiel and I left the crowd of spectators around Crouchy’s house. Ezekiel strode in front of me, each step of his like a new disease, the shiny sphere in the back of his head contracting and dilating as it received its invisible signals. He headed toward the town square and I followed him.

  We passed members of the Apocalypse Brigade. They wore monster masks of sharp tongued Kali and black faced Abraxas and passed out pamphlets on the end of the world. In the last seven years the Apocalypse Brigade had grown from a fringe group to the predominating political influence in Edgewater.

  “Fuck off. See this? It means prophet,” Ezekiel said when a woman wearing a bird headed monster mask tried shoving end of the world pamphlets into Ezekiel’s chest. When Ezekiel pushed her aside the woman stepped into the street and shook her head from side to side as if trying to ward off insects.

  I edged past the woman and hurried after Ezekiel. By the time I caught up with him he’d already rounded the corner past the gathering crowd of Apocalypse Brigadiers and started heading downtown.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “I have to check in some paperwork at the prophet headquarters,” Ezekiel said, “then I’m free. Well, relatively speaking.”

  We passed the slip clinic. The windows of the slip clinic ground their gray teeth into the dirt and the foundation buckled like a bad spine. The gritty, honeycombed doors opened and a doctor escorted a deadhead outside, her hands and head wrapped in gauze.

  “Don’t worry, darling,” the slip doctor said, like he was talking to a child, but his fingers tightened on her arm until he smudged it with bruises.

  Ezekiel and I reached the prophet headquarters. He went inside and I waited outside on the steps. Even in the center of downtown Edgewater I could see the tops of the trees in the woods beyond, Crouchy’s upside down wicker basket like a pike-faced scar, the deflated red balloon draped over the greenery.

  “Flowers?” a voice said.

  To my right a woman stood holding several tissue wrapped bouquets of small yellow and pink flowers. She had cropped black hair like a man and though she had a young face, her skin was nobbed with scars like the age knots of a hickory.

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “Flowers,” the woman said, “do you want any?”

  “No thanks. I have no money.”

  I expected her to walk away, but instead she continued to stand there staring at me with wine dark eyes, holding the flowers to her chest, squeezing her fists so hard I thought she might break. From inside the Prophet Headquarters lobby I heard the Teddy and Delilah show blasting through the speakers, Delilah laughing and laughing.

  “I’ve never seen you before,” I said, “where are you from?”

  She said nothing.

  “Your name, at least? I’m Charles.”

  She looked back behind her, out toward the woods, toward Crouchy’s hot air balloon ensnared in the treetops. Then she turned back toward me. I thought those eyes might tear the skin off of my face.

  “Did you see him fall?” she asked me.

  I nodded.

  “You know they don’t always fall,” she said, “they just want you to believe that.”

  At that moment, Ezekiel strode down the steps of the prophet Headquarters.

  “Go away, we don’t want any flowers,” he said.

  The woman didn’t acknowledge Ezekiel. She continued to stare at me.

  “I’m not joking, go away and stop hanging around here. Every damn day, selling flowers. Maybe it wouldn’t be so annoying if you were prettier.”

  “She’s not doing anything wrong,” I said.

  “She’s probably a host for every disease this side of the black planet.”

  “What?”

  “Look at that cut hair. Means she’s a whore. Worse, one who got caught.”

  Ezekiel strode past me and the shiny sphere in the back of his head made a noise like the clicking of teeth. The woman with the flowers made no movement as he walked past her.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  I stood up from the Prophet Headquarter steps and headed in the direction Ezekiel went.

  “Don’t worry about it,” the woman said as I walked past, “I deserve to be a whore.”

  Chapter Two

  Ezekiel took me to an execution in the town square outside the courthouse the following week. The victim that Saturday morning was Maddy the Mad girl, the baby-faced widow serial killer.

  The executioner stood on the platform where Maddy sat on the ELECTRIC BABY 4000, the latest and greatest model of electric chair.

  "Maddy the Mad girl has been sentenced to death by electric chair for the murder of an untold number of Edgewater strippers,"

  "She could have been more original, don't you think?" said the popcorn man beside us in the crowd, "everyone kills strippers. Want some popcorn?”

  “No,” Ezekiel said, and then turned to me, “Want any popcorn?”

  Maddy the Mad girl made no movement as men in gray suits jumped up on the platform and tightened the straps on her wrists and ankles, and then fit the electrodes onto her forehead and tongue.

  “No thanks. Not hungry,” I whispered.

  “Those jokers are back,” Ezekiel said, and motioned toward the periphery of the town square.

  The Apocalypse Brigade stood on the fringe
of the crowd holding signs that said “She won’t be the last,” and “You’re going to hell, baby girl.” They stood motionless in razor-colored coats and nickel plated fingerless gloves. They wore monster masks that appeared to be quietly choking them.

  “People like that shouldn’t breed,” Ezekiel said, “Every damn day they’re crawling around in the streets. Repent. It’s the end of the world. Repent. Like we don’t know already.”

  Ezekiel turned back toward Maddy.

  “Look at her face. It's like a lake at the bottom of the world. Nothing can touch her. Fucking tragic,” Ezekiel said.

  But I couldn't look at Maddy the mad girl's face anymore. Not after I'd seen her feet. Her bare feet, twisted back and broken. Like vulture's feet. Demon feet that could have been dragged across the gritty glass floor of hell.

  "God invented the electric chair so that we could murder in his good name," the reverend said, "so that he wouldn't have to waste a precious lightning storm on scum like this."

  The reverend tore away Middy’s smock, revealing her bare, bruised breasts and her belly that crumpled underneath her ribs like a chasm. Tattooed on her breasts were the words "God is not real."

  “Popcorn! Get your popcorn!” the popcorn man shouted.

  Behind us a young couple kissed frantically.

  "I’ve taken so many girls’ virginity's at executions like this," Ezekiel said, "The heat always gets to them.”

  The reverend moved toward the switch. I wanted to run before Maddy started kicking and jolting in the chair, but I couldn't move in the packed crowd.

  The reverend flipped the switch on the ELECTRIC BABY 4000.

  Maddy's limbs hit the straps hard. Her infant breasts turned black, a crisscross of braised exo-veins. Even after she burst into flames her tattoo, the "God is not real," still blazed visible on her skin.

  The crowd started to disperse before the final shocks were administered. I found myself following them.

  “Charles, where are you going?” Ezekiel asked.