Jeanine fell down into the grass trembling and clutching at my father's jacket. I rolled over her ribs and my face struck the dirt. Ezekiel stopped and turned around. I looked behind my shoulder to see two figures approaching us through the woods with their fingers spitting sparks. I got onto my knees and pushed Jeanine down into the hollow of a tree.
“Don’t make a noise, okay?” I said, and pressed my fingers to my lips in a “shh” motion.
She curled her knees up to her chin, and she hugged my father's jacket to her chest.
I stood up aching and watched the first figure approach through the trees. He wore a long trench coat that couldn't hide the skinny parabola of his body. He lifted his head and the black moon struck the electrical nodes where his eyes used to be, struck the curving shine of the plastic wrap around his bald head.
"Smarts?" I whispered.
"This asshole?" Ezekiel shouted.
"I've been looking for you," Smarts said as he approached Ezekiel.
A young woman trailed behind him wearing a teddy bear pink slip and holding a machine gun. Both of them wore armbands with the number six.
"I should have known it was you who blew up the slip clinic," Ezekiel said, "you being such an asshole and all. You couldn't do us all a favor and stay dead, could you? And you ruined my shoes."
I placed my head against Jeanine's hiding tree and its trunk trembled underneath me.
"I'm sorry," I said.
"Are you apologizing to Smarts?" Ezekiel asked me.
"I'm sorry I didn't have five thousands to save you," I said, "If I could I would have saved you all."
The young woman lifted up her machine gun. Ezekiel whipped a pistol out from underneath his coat and shot her in the chest. She stumbled backwards and fell to the dirt. The machine gun fire burst up above us through the trees and then stopped.
"What?" he said as he turned to look at me, "I'm a prophet. I'm allowed a deus ex machine every once in a while."
Smarts opened up his trench-coat. Inside were rows of taped explosive.
Smarts clicked on his lighter.
"You're blind," Ezekiel said.
The shiny sphere on the back of Ezekiel’s head flared up and Smarts’ electrical nodes busted. The lighter snapped off. Smarts trembled and touched his broken artificial eyes. Then Smarts searched for his taped explosives with shaking fingers, patting at his coat until he dropped the lighter in the dirt. He got onto his knees to search for it.
Ezekiel kicked Smarts in the ribs and knocked him on his back.
"What are you?" he asked Smarts.
Ezekiel straddled him and grabbed his plastic-wrapped head. He leaned down and screamed into his empty face.
"I have God on my side, you idiot!"
Ezekiel pulled off Smarts' coat and threw it away into the grass. Then he started beating Smarts, tearing at his clothes, biting at his unraveling head. Smarts twisted and scratched at Ezekiel's face but his nails left no mark. I stood and watched them beside the tree, transfixed in the gleam of the sphere in the back of Ezekiel's head. All my limbs slowed into calcified trash. I could hear the blood in my ears flowing down through me like the blood that God churned through the kitchen taps.
"You worthless asshole," Ezekiel said to Smarts, "you're dirt compared to me. You're dirt and what you did to the slip clinic is all for nothing. Now you're going to die like all heretics die."
He shoved Smarts face down and stuffed his mouth with grass and dirt. Smarts head seemed to balloon up, as if it might pop off his neck. The dirt came spilling out of his mouth as fast as Ezekiel could shovel it in, bits of blood and dandelion fluff coming up from Smarts' throat and being pushed into his empty eye sockets.
Smarts lifted up his head in my direction and I thought those empty eyes looked straight through me.
I ran.
“Charles!” Ezekiel called after me, “where are you going? Come back here!”
I didn’t stop running.
Monsters chased after me on all sides. I couldn’t see them, but I could feel the heat of them as they uprooted the trees and tore wide lines into the dirt.
I ran into town and became swept back up into the street riot. Someone in a bear mask grabbed me by the lapels.
“You’re the heretic!” He said.
He hit me and bruised my jaw. Then he grabbed me by the shoulders to keep me from falling down.
“Let me go!” I said, “there aren’t any heretics anymore. Not anywhere now. Can’t you see that?”
“You did this to us all!” he said as he hit me with his fists again and again, “you killed my baby girl! You damned everyone!”
I wanted to tell him that he was wrong, but when I spoke I said:
“I saw two good men die tonight. Please hit me again.”
He raised his fist again, his knuckles raw.
“I left someone I loved all alone in the woods. Please hit me again,” I said, nearly sobbing, “hit me again and again.”
“You’re crazy,” he said, laughing to choke.
He let me go.
The monsters started grabbing people and dragging them off into the night. My eyes stung with sweat and blood, and soon I couldn’t distinguish the Apocalypse Brigadiers from the monsters that swept in and out of the crowd.
“This is your punishment for your disobedience!” one of the Apocalypse Brigadiers shouted.
“Tell us something we don’t know!” someone shouted back.
I struggled through the crowd with one hand over my eyes and the other held out in front of me. Someone grabbed onto my arm and screamed in my ear. The screaming stopped abruptly when a monster ripped their body away and dragged it headfirst through the crowd.
Several feet away I pried the severed arm off of me and dropped it onto the ground. I never took my hand off of my eyes. I felt that if I looked I would die.
I wanted to drop to my knees and smash my head into the concrete. I could lay there until the heartbeat of the plague machines became my heartbeat, and the dirt piled on top of me.
But then I thought of Leda, alone in my room while a lonely death slithered onto the porch, and I kept going.
The plague machines smashed their fists down and ruptured the street. The street broke into a hill, and I tumbled backwards into an Apocalypse Brigadier, knocking her mask off. Before she could say or do anything to me, I was crawling back up the hill, hand out in front of me.
I got to the top of the hill and the air cracked with heat. People reached out to grab me, but quickly slipped away. I descended the hill. At the bottom I slogged through a pool of tar where people thrashed and reached out for my ankles. I stepped on a girl’s hand on accident, and when she cried out the tar bubbled out of her mouth and her cry seemed to be coming up from underwater.
I wanted to reach down and pull her up out of the tar, but instead I thought of Leda, kneeling on my bed, the little birds like scars detaching themselves from her and flying away. I left the girl and kept going.
When I reached the end of the street I let my hand drop from my face and I ran down an alleyway away from the riot. Teddy in God’s black mask pointed at me with an accusing finger through every open window. The plague machines and the monsters built a chasm for me to fall into, but I climbed out of it. I peeled the gore and charred remains of the Apocalypse Brigade off my face. I choked on the dust of buildings falling around me. I made it to the edge of the town with all of my limbs intact, and when I saw my house at the edge of the swamp, I sucked in a cry.
I crawled up the porch. I crept inside the front door.
“Leda!” I called out over the blare of the television. No response.
I went up the stairs past Sissy and Momma sitting on the couch with their hollowed out bones and cigarettes. I panted so hard I thought my bones might break. My bruises stuck to the wall where I reached out to keep myself from falling.
I opened the bedroom door and found Leda gone.
Chapter Seven
She never came back.
<
br /> I went into the woods, in our old meeting place, and waited for her there. I touched trees and tried to pull them into my hips to dance, because I thought Leda might’ve really turned into a tree, and she was calling for help inside their bark. I scratched and scratched at the roots looking for her face. I crushed flowers searching for her smell.
When daybreak came I wandered through the ruins of the previous night’s riot calling out her name. There was no response except for the cries of people trapped in various stages of dying, the rumble of the plague machines returning to the field. I went to the flower shop where she worked and approached the old woman who sat behind the counter picking dandelion fluff off her wrists and painting red roses blue. She didn’t look up when I went to the counter.
“Sorry to bother you,” I said to her, and then rapped on the counter.
The old woman looked up startled. She dropped the paintbrush. Her face was an ashy blank.
“Has Leda been to work recently?” I asked.
“Do you work with the government?” she asked me.
“Let me guess,” I said, “she doesn’t exist, right?”
The old woman picked up the paintbrush again and gave me this knowing, sardonic smile - a smile full of weeds.
“You got it,” she said.
I went back home when night fell.
I left the light on at night so that she could find her way home.
I rubbed the teeth marks Leda left on the back of my neck. I picked up the flowers ground into the carpet, and emptied her suitcase so I could hang all her dresses up in my closet. I discovered a butterfly Leda breathed on the bathroom mirror, and I stood there for hours tracing its shape until it wore away. In the middle of the night I thought I heard her creeping down the stairs, so I'd get up and run down the hallway to greet her, only to be met by the endless face of the empty stairway.
When I returned to the bedroom alone I threw open the window and the black moon came down from the sky to stay with me. The black moon slept in the warm spot on her side of the bed and cast against the wall the shape of her.
Teddy and Delilah stood at the foot of my bed with an ocean of television static swirling at their feet. The noise rose and my bed floated off its legs toward the ceiling. I gripped the sheets to keep from falling down into the waters below, and I turned my face toward the light. If I wanted Leda to return to me, I couldn't let the light go out.
I remembered something Sissy once told me, back when flowers still grew in her garden, about how the cells in our bodies are completely replaced every seven years. The cells of my body were all igniting and dying and being reborn, and soon, I thought, I would have fingers that had never touched Leda's hair, her warm skin. Soon I would have eyes that never saw her face.
Momma told me Leda was gone for good, but I knew she didn't know one way or the other. Teddy told me the only way to fix a broken heart was to not have a heart at all. Delilah only stretched out on her gray bed and quivered as she watched some invisible monster on the ceiling in their small room.
I called the police about Leda's disappearance and they took me down to the station where I sat in a colorless room underneath a leper colored light. They kept me there alone for two hours, until the sheriff shuffled in, wiping at his nose and twitching.
“What seems to be the problem?”
“I wanted to report a missing person.”
He snorted.
“Your wife?” he asked.
“I suppose you can say that.”
“We don’t investigate missing persons anymore,” he said.
“What are you talking about?” I said, “you’re the police. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?”
The sheriff leaned back in his chair.
“You know what? I think I’d like some coffee,” he said, “would you like some coffee?”
“What?”
“Don’t you know what coffee is, son?”
“Yeah, I know what coffee is,” I said, “Why aren’t you taking this seriously? I need someone to help me.”
The sheriff stood up from the desk.
“I’m going to go get some coffee,” he said, “you wait here.”
“Hey!” I called out, but he’d already left the room and the door banged shut behind him. I waited in the room for another half hour, counting the granules on the ceiling. The sheriff came back into the room empty-handed.
“How was the coffee?” I asked him.
“What are you talking about?” he asked, “what coffee?”
“Never mind,” I said.
The sheriff sat back down at the desk.
“What were you here for again?” he asked me.
I tried to make out the sheriff’s face in the dim light, but no distinguishable features rose up out of the gloom. For all I could make out, his face was a swarm of insects. I tried to clear my throat before I spoke again, but my words came out hoarse and thick anyways.
“I wanted to report a missing person,” I said.
“Oh, that’s right,” he said, “your wife.”
“Yeah,” I said, “there has to be something you can do.”
“Did she commit adultery?” the sheriff asked me.
“What?”
“You know, adultery. Was she fucking someone else?”
“What does that have to do with anything?” I asked.
The sheriff sighed and looked down at the desk, which was empty, and then back up at me.
“If you like I could get the department to pray for her,” he said.
“Yeah, sure,” I said, “that’d be great. Thanks.”
I left the police station and went back home. Suddenly the stairs became an insurmountable obstacle, and I had to crawl on my hands and knees to get to the second floor. I swam heavy through the air and oxygen became a warm proboscis lapping at the back of my head. I managed to climb up into bed and draw the blankets up to my head when I heard the familiar sound of an IV stand being dragged down the hallway floor.
"Maybe she just didn't love you," Sissy said, appearing in my doorway with her eyes about to run down her face.
I said nothing and Sissy slipped away.
The nights kept passing by and Leda's absence grew a hole in my throat, but I couldn't believe she left me. I kept turning over in bed, expecting to see her curled up and lying beside me, only to find the black moon warming the sheets. The woods scraped against the side of the house and the black moon kicked. I rocked on the floor and thought the space Leda left behind might close in to devour me.
Out in the dark I heard the machines. Blind, vicious machines. I wanted to ask them where Leda went. I wanted to ask them why she left me here alone with the dead.
But I imagined they would only say, “God gave her to you and God took her away.”
Chapter Eight
"You are the worst kind of idealist," Teddy told me, "lingering in the torment of your inertia."
I sat on the couch watching the Teddy and Delilah show, wedged between Momma and Sissy. Momma and Sissy smoked cigarettes that turned their fingers and teeth yellow. The smoke drew a noose around my neck. I couldn't see through the haze, and I ended up knocking a glass of whiskey off the coffee table.
"No," Teddy said as I sat on the couch crying as the whiskey soaked into the carpet, "I take that back. You're not just the worst kind of idealist. You're the worst kind of human being."
"You're so melodramatic, Bubba," Sissy said, "hand me another cigarette."
"We have a very special guest with us today," Teddy said, and on the bed beside Delilah sat a small woman with a dog's face and cat red eyeglasses, her knees drawn up to her chin and her sallow face slipping off her cheeks. She wore a breastplate made out of animal bones, and she kept tapping against its edges with her purple painted nails.
"Look at the camera, darling," Teddy said, "can you smile? There you go. Our guest with us today is Slim Sarah, a woman of extraordinary devotion. Let's run the clip again. Smile, darling."
Slim Sara
h, played in the clip by a faceless, sexless silhouette wearing a woman's mouse brown hair, lived the suburban apotheosis with her husband and twelve children. Her husband, wearing a coal colored business suit and a leaning smile, sat in front of the television every night with the twelve children. As Teddy and Delilah sang lullabies and danced with human sized spiders, the children basked in the carnal glow of the pristine house.
One day while Slim Sarah's husband was away, God told her to line up her twelve children in the living room and kill the ones he disapproved of.
"Are my children bad?" Slim Sarah asked.
"It's not about whether they're good or bad," God said, as he climbed out of the television to hand Slim Sarah a meat tenderizer and a bucket of water. His body bristled and spread out through the entire room in a toxic haze.
"Is this the one, God?" Slim Sarah asked as she approached the first child. Kelly, the youngest, wearing red bows in her hair and scratching smiley faces into the wall with the heels of her baby doll shoes.
"No," God said, and Slim Sarah beat the girl to death with the meat tenderizer and for good measure, shoved her head into the bucket of water.
"Is this the one, God?" Slim Sarah asked of the next child. This was Terrance, classical music aficionado, and you can be sure everyone hated him for it. He kept making sideways glances like he could see shapes coming out of God's fog.
"No," God said, and Slim Sarah picked up the meat tenderizer from the carpet, slick with tender young blood, and murdered Terrance.
"Is this the one, God?" She asked of the next child, while Terrance lay face down in the bucket of water.
"No," God said, and "no," and, "no," until eleven of Slim Sarah's children, beaten and burst and anemic, lay out on the carpet, their bodies drying stiff and cool.
Slim Sarah approached the last child. Streaks of the children's blood dripped through Slim Sarah's hair, stuck underneath her fingernails. Chunks of gore stained her cookie making apron. The last child was shy little Meadow, with overdeveloped hips and breast and her limbs shooting out of the hull of her waist like gangly cannons. Meadow, who crawled on the floor so she could know how cats lived, who hid inside closets to watch the migration of dust.
The Crooked God Machine Page 12
