by Brian Hodge
The meanness was evaporating from his face. The old Walter was fading out. The lines of physiognomy she had associated with his worst traits were gone. His face had smoothed out; he actually looked well-fed. It was the bacteria inside him, expiring, forming gas to bloat him. His face inflated as his fluids sought gravity.
JJ knew this, and would admit it to herself later, but for now she wanted to celebrate the fleeting reality of Walter as she had forever idealized him–all hers, with the contrariness subtracted.
His penis was not dead flaccid, yet not useless either. JJ opened the tiny bottle of almond oil and another romantic scent was layered into the room. She lubed herself, then him, and straddled him, quick to climax because she was now astride the man she really wanted, and she wanted him because what she was doing held the tang of taboo. She whooped when she came, and Walter raised no objection.
As she fell asleep she noticed Walter's fingernails seemed longer. That made sense; Walter was unable to bite them, and he bit his nails whenever anything pestered him, which was, well, all the time.
Before.
For hair and nails to grow, they required nourishment from oxygenated blood. If breathing stops, if the heart no longer beats, nourishment is impossible and cellular life ceases. The reason fingernails appeared to grow on corpses was that the skin pulls back from the nails as moisture leaches from the body, exposing portions previously covered. JJ knew this. She also knew that if the hamburger in the fridge smelled the way Walter now smelled in close-up, she would throw it away, outside, where it could not ferment so blatantly.
She knew these things, but by the time she thought them through, she was wrapped up in satiated sleep.
A couple of days later, JJ got trapped into a long phone conversation with Cecily, hot for a payoff on her rain-check. Why? Only one reason Cecily would be dying to talk about men in general, scumbags in specific, and her latest conquest, ole musky Cleve, in particular.
"When he put it in, JJ, it's like–I don't know. That muscle or something just snapped shut, like it didn't want him inside of me."
"Your sphincter."
Cecily paused; the gap felt uncomfortable. "Whatever. But I think I know what it was–it was like, well, all that courtin and chit-chat, all that wine-sippin and small talk, and he didn't care about anything we talked about; all's he cared about was whether he could put his thing in me, or not."
"It's a contest, and once the clothes come off, the contest is won."
"Yeah. Like that. Except…he didn't fool me into nothin. I wanted him in me, baby, by that time I needed him in me. You know how when you get to that point where you just gotta get filled up? And then you get to that point where he's gotta go faster, faster-deeper, then boom?" There was another pause, this one breathy, as though Cecily was turning herself on via instant replay. She was now being a bad girl over the phone. There followed a sound like a sigh. "Well. Anyway. You know, JJ. So–is Walter treating you right?"
"He's a changed man, Cecily. He's there for me."
"I'm glad somebody out there has got a relationship that works."
"So what happened to your guy? Cleve?"
"Oh. Well…he shot his stuff all over my comforter on account of my muscle thing. He's the kind of guy who'd think it was romantic or something if I licked it up and then frenched him. Eeuww, gross, I can't believe I just said that."
"It's all just protein, Cecily."
"Now that's truly gross." She giggled. "JJ? I thought your sphincter was, you know, up your butt."
"It is, dear." JJ called up her mini-lecture on feminine musculature. She felt extremely balanced; a woman with time, and a man to spend it on her. She'd learned the muscle arrangements from one of several books she'd acquired recently, all concerning the makeup of the human body. Yesterday she'd begun burning candles and cinnamon incense, and keeping the bedroom door shut, for privacy's sake, and because of the smell.
It was possible, she thought, to love a man until there was almost nothing to make love to.
Cecily begged off with: "Golly, JJ, that's…um, interesting." Or words to that effect. To JJ it was tone that mattered, and Cecily's tone said I didn't know you were so into the icky stuff gotta go. Welcome to the real world, Cecily old pal.
Cecily would probably not call back for a week, minimum.
JJ was naked, oiled and scented. It had been a tasty jest, to chide Cecily with sexual anatomics while sliding around atop Walter in the dark. Walter himself was quite dark, so JJ kept the lights off. The candles burned. The incense smoked all vision to a haze. It was like a dream.
Maybe someday poor Cecily would discover a man like Walter.
"Happy anniversary, my love." JJ sipped champagne in crystal. She dipped a finger into the flute, then eased it between her thighs to start things up again. Bubbly could make her so brazen.
She toasted the week that had passed since Walter had stopped breathing.
Her fingers moved to his lips, pushing the corners up to form a smile, which stayed exactly as she had arranged it. They made love every day, sometimes more than once, at all sorts of hours. Their shared bed had transformed into a domain whereupon JJ's sexuality had finally caught fire and burned hot.
Walter had grown warm again, all on his own. She could feel tiny movements, fervid activity just beneath the tight skin of his belly. His perma-plaqued smile asked nothing of her. It is an unspoken contract that lovers permit each other their humanity–their smells and body functions–so the stench in the bedroom was a minuscule cost.
Ignoring the insects, JJ wrapped herself up in the man of her dreams. And in her dreams, there were no insects, and everything was perfect at last.
Last Call for the Sons of Shock
Blank Frank notches down the Cramps, keeping an eye on the blue LED bars of the equalizer. He likes the light.
"Creature from the Black Leather Lagoon" calms.
The club is called Un/Dead. The sound system is from the guts of the old Tropicana, LA's altar of mud wrestling, foxy boxing, and the cock-tease unto physical pain. Its specs are for metal, loud, lots of it. The punch of the subwoofers is a lot like getting jabbed in the sternum by a big velvet piston.
Blank Frank likes the power. Whenever he thinks of getting physical, he thinks of the Vise Grip.
He perches a case of Stoli on one big shoulder and tucks another of Beam under his arm. After this he is done replenishing the bar. To survive the weekend crush, you've gotta arm. Blank Frank can lug a five-case stack without using a dolly. He has to duck to clear the lintel. The passage back to the phones and bathrooms is tricked out to resemble a bank vault door, with tumblers and cranks. It is up past six-six. Not enough for Blank Frank, who still has to stoop.
Two hours till doors open.
Blank Frank enjoys his quiet time. He has not forgotten the date. He grins at the movie poster framed next to the back bar register. He scored it at a Hollywood memorabilia shop for an obscene price even though he got a professional discount. He had it mounted on foamcore to flatten the creases. He does not permit dust to accrete on the glass. The poster Black leather Required is duotone, with lurid lettering. His first feature film. Every so often some Un/Dead patron with cash to burn will make an exorbitant offer to buy it. Blank Frank always says no with a smile … and usually spots a drink on the house for those who ask.
He nudges the volume back up for Bauhaus, doing "Bela Lugosi's Dead," extended mix.
The staff sticks to coffee and iced tea. Blank Frank prefers a nonalcoholic concoction of his own device, which he has christened a Blind Hermit. He rustles up one, now, in a chromium blender, one hand idly on his plasma globe. Michelle gave it to him about four years back, when they first became affordably popular. Touch the exterior and the purple veins of electricity follow your fingertips. Knobs permit you to fiddle with density and amplitude, letting you master the power, feel like Tesla showing off.
Blank Frank likes the writhing electricity.
By now he carries many tatto
os. But the one on the back of his left hand–the hand toying with the globe–is his favorite: a stylized planet Earth, with a tiny propellered aircraft circling it. It is old enough that the cobalt-colored dermal ink has begun to blur.
Blank Frank has been utterly bald for three decades. A tiny wisp of hair issues from his occipital. He keeps it in a neat braid, clipped to six inches. It is dead white. Sometimes, when he drinks, the braid darkens briefly. He doesn't know why.
Michelle used to be a stripper, before management got busted, the club got sold, and Un/Dead was born of the ashes. She likes being a waitress and she likes Blank Frank. She calls him "big guy." Half the regulars think Blank Frank and Michelle have something steamy going. They don't. But the fantasy detours them around a lot of potential problems, especially on weekend nights. Blank Frank has learned that people often need fantasies to seem superficially true, whether they really are or not.
Blank Frank dusts. If only the bikers could see him now, being dainty and attentive. Puttering.
Blank Frank rarely has to play bouncer whenever some booze-fueled trouble sets to brewing inside Un/Dead. Mostly, he just strolls up behind the perp and waits for him or her to turn around and apologize. Blank Frank's muscle duties generally consist of just looming.
If not, he thinks with a smile, there's always the Vise Grip.
The video monitor shows a Red Top taxicab parking outside the employee entrance. Blank Frank is pleased. This arrival coincides exactly with his finish-up on the bartop, which now gleams like onyx. He taps up the slide pot controlling the mike volume on the door's security system. There will come three knocks.
Blank Frank likes all this gadgetry. Cameras and shotgun mikes, amps and strobes and strong, clean alternating current to web it all in concert with maestro surety. Blank Frank loves the switches and toggles and running lights. But most of all, he loves the power.
Tap-tap-tap. Precisely. Always three knocks.
"Good," he says to himself, drawing out the vowel. As he hastens to the door, the song ends and the club fills with the empowered hiss of electrified dead air.
Out by limo. In by cab. One of those eternally bedamned scheduling glitches.
The Count over-tips the cabbie because his habit is to deal only in round sums. He never takes … change. The Count has never paid taxes. He has cleared forty-three million large in the past year, most of it safely banked in bullion, out-of-country, after overhead and laundering.
The Count raps smartly with his umbrella on the service door of Un/Dead. Blank Frank never makes him knock twice.
It is a pleasure to see Blank Frank's face overloading the tiny security window; his huge form filling the threshold. The Count enjoys Blank Frank despite his limitations when it comes to social intercourse. It is relaxing to appreciate Blank Frank's condition-less loyalty, the innate tidal pull of honor and raw justice that seems programmed into the big fellow. Soothing, it is, to sit and drink and chat lightweight chat with him, in the autopilot way normals told their normal acquaintances where they'd gone and what they'd done since their last visit. Venomless niceties.
None of the buildings in Los Angeles have been standing as long as the Count and Blank Frank have been alive.
Alive. Now there's a word that begs a few new comprehensive, enumerated definitions in the dictionary. Scholars could quibble, but the Count and Blank Frank and Larry were definitely alive. As in "living"–especially Larry. Robots, zombies and the walking dead in general could never get misty about such traditions as this threesome's annual conclaves at Un/Dead.
The Count's face is mappy, the wrinkles in his flesh, rice-paper fine. Not creases of age, but tributaries of usage, like the creeks and streams of palmistry. His pallor, as always, tends toward blue. He wears dark shades with faceted, lozenge-shaped lenses of apache tear; mineral crystal stained bloody-black. Behind them, his eyes, bright blue like a husky's.
He forever maintains his hair wet and backswept, what Larry has called his "renegade opera conductor coif." Dramatic threads of pure cobalt-black streak backward from the snow-white crown and temples. His lips are as thin and bloodless as two slices of smoked liver. His diet does not render him robustly sanguine; it merely sustains him, these days. It bores him.
Before Blank Frank can get the door open, the Count fires up a hand-rolled cigarette of coca paste and drags the milky smoke deep. It mingles with the dope already loitering in his metabolism and perks him to.
The cab hisses away into the wet night. Rain on the way.
Blank Frank is holding the door for him, grandly, playing butler.
The Count's brow is overcast. "Have you forgotten so soon, my friend?" Only a ghost of his old, marble-mouthed, middle-Euro accent lingers. It is a trait that the Count has fought for long years to master, and he is justly proud that his English is intelligible. Occasionally, someone asks if he is from Canada.
Blank Frank pulls the exaggerated face of a child committing a big boo-boo. "Oops, sorry." He clears his throat. "Will you come in?"
Equally theatrically, the Count nods and walks several thousand worth of Armani double-breasted into the cool, dim retreat of the bar. It is nicer when you're invited, anyway.
"Larry?" says the Count.
"Not yet," says Blank Frank. "You know Larry–tardy is his twin. There's real-time and Larry time. Celebrities expect you to expect them to be late." He points toward the back bar clock, as if that explains everything.
The Count can see perfectly in the dark, even with his murky glasses. As he strips them, Blank Frank notices the silver crucifix dangling from his left earlobe, upside-down.
"You into metal?"
"I like the ornamentation," says the Count. "I was never too big on jewelry; greedy people try to dig you up and steal it if they know you're wearing it; just ask Larry. The sort of people who would come to thieve from the dead in the middle of the night are not the class one would choose for friendly diversion."
Blank Frank conducts the Count to three high-back Victorian chairs he has dragged in from the lounge and positioned around a cocktail table. The grouping is directly beneath a pin-light spot, intentionally theatrical.
"Impressive." The Count's gaze flickers toward the bar. Blank Frank is way ahead of him.
The Count sits, continuing: "I once knew a woman who was beleaguered by a devastating allergy to cats. And this was a person who felt some deep emotional communion with that species. Then one day, poof!
She no longer sneezed; her eyes no longer watered. She could stop taking medications that made her drowsy. She had forced herself to be around cats so much that her body chemistry adapted. The allergy receded." He fingers the silver cross hanging from his ear, a double threat, once upon a time. "I wear this as a reminder of how the body can triumph. Better living through chemistry"
"It was the same with me and fire." Blank Frank hands over a very potent mixed drink called a Gangbang. The Count sips, then presses his eyelids contentedly shut. Like a cat. The drink must be industrial strength. Controlled substances are the Count's lifeblood.
Blank Frank watches as the Count sucks out another long, deep, soul-drowning draught. "You know Larry's going to ask again, whether you're still doing … what you're doing."
"I brook no apologia or excuses." Nevertheless, Blank Frank sees him straighten in his chair, almost defensively. "I could say that you provide the same service in this place." With an outswept hand, he indicts the bar. If nothing else remains recognizable, the Count's gesticulations remain grandiose; physical exclamation points.
"It's legal. Food. Drink. Some smoke."
"Oh, yes, there's the rub." The Count pinches the bridge of his nose. He consumes commercial decongestants ceaselessly. Blank Frank expects him to pop a few pills, but instead the Count lays out a scoop of toot inside his mandarin pinky fingernail, which is lacquered ebony, elongated, a talon. Capacious. Blank Frank knows from experience that the hair and nails continue growing long after death. The Count inhales the equivalent of a pretty
good dinner at Spago. Cappucino included.
"There is no place in the world I have not lived," says the Count. "Even the Arctic. The Australian outback. The Kenyan sedge. Siberia. I walk unharmed through fire-fight zones, through sectors of strife. You learn so much when you observe people at war. I've survived holocausts, conflagration, even a low-yield one-megaton test, once, just to see if I could do it. Sue me; I was high. But wherever I venture, whatever phylum of human beings I encounter, they all have one thing in common."
"The red stuff." Blank Frank half-jests; he dislikes it when the mood grows too grim.
"No. It is their need to be narcotized." The Count will not be swerved. "With television. Sex. Coffee. Power. Fast cars and sado-games. Emotional encumbrances. More than anything else, with chemicals. All drugs are like instant coffee. The fast purchase of a feeling. You buy the feeling, instead of earning it. You want to relax, go up or go down, get strong or get stupid? You simply swallow or snort or inject, and the world changes because of you. The most lucrative commercial enterprises are those with the most undeniable core simplicity; just look at prostitution. Blood, bodies, armaments, position–all commodities. Human beings want so much out of life."
The Count smiles, sips. He knows that the end of life is only the beginning. Today is the first day of the rest of your death.
"I do apologize, my old friend, for coming on so aggressively. I've rationalized my calling, you see, to the point where it is a speech of lists; I make my case with demographics. Rarely do I find anyone who cares to suffer the speech."
"You've been rehearsing." Blank Frank recognizes the bold streak the Count gets in his voice when declaiming. Blank Frank has himself been jammed with so many hypos in the past few centuries that he has run out of free veins. He has sampled the Count's root canal quality coke; it made him irritable and sneezy. The only drugs that still seem to work on him unfailingly are extremely powerful sedatives in large, near-toxic dosages. And those never last long. "Tell me. The drugs. Do they have any effect on you?"
