The People's Republic of Everything

by Nick Mamatas

  —The Halloween parade in Salem, and the witch trials. The costumes take over the parade goers wearing them thanks to the curse of Tituba, and then. . . .

  —For Halloween last year I dressed like a sexy watermelon.

  —A sexy what? That’s hilarious.

  —Yeah, it was a silly costume. A tube dress, a little slinky, very short, pink with a seed pattern and green trim on the bottom. And it had a bite taken out of the side. I had gotten rib tattoos—stylized wings—and wanted to show at least one of them off.

  —I wonder how many Harvard grads students dress like sexy, winged watermelons?

  —I’d guess . . . one. Just me. Your hand.

  —Yes?

  —It’s red, almost purple.

  —It hurts a lot. But it’s not unbearable. Very little is unbearable, I’ve found. Human beings can bear a lot of pain. A lot.

  —Well, the experience of pain is subjective. Even the expectation that pain will decrease can lead to pain decreasing.

  —I always anticipate pain. Nothing but pain. A breeze passing over my skin is pain. The sun in my eyes is pain. My mind in the dark is nothing but pain.

  —Is that . . . from your book?

  —Sure it is.

  —Okay.

  —I bet you’re not going to go to the library now to pick up a copy, eh?

  —I have a lot of reading to do for my dissertation.

  —No problem, I’m sure you do.

  —I’m going to show you a Pain Rating Scale. Uh, there are little cartoon faces on this, but you can ignore them if you like. They’re mostly for kids. Point to the face and number that most exactly describes the pain you are experiencing.

  8

  hurts

  whole lot

  —You can pull up the bar and remove your hand at any time.

  —I like the cartoon faces. Do people generally not cry until the pain hits 10?

  —No, no. That’s just for children.

  —You do this experiment on kids?

  —No. But the chart is for kids as well as adults. The faces are not supposed to represent a person’s expression, but what they feel on the inside.

  —Oh. In that case. . . .

  0

  no hurt

  —Really?

  —Yes. Now, you point to how much it hurt when you got your wing tattoos.

  —Okay.

  4

  hurts

  little more

  —But you sat there for hours. Hell, you paid for it. I’m at least getting twenty dollars for this, maybe more.

  —I’m sorry, I thought I made it clear that you’ll be getting twenty dollars no matter how long you can tolerate the pain. Would you like to stop now?

  —Why did you get wing tattoos?

  —Am I a distraction? Maybe you should concentrate on your hand.

  —I can stay here for hours. Zero, no hurt! Remember? Didn’t the form I filled out promise that there’d be no permanent damage? You said the rod won’t break the skin.

  —It won’t.

  —Good. So we can look at one another in silence, or we can do something tedious, like talk about men, or you can tell me more about your tattoos.

  —I got them with the settlement money.

  —How much did it hurt when you got the settlement money?

  —The proposed topic of discussion is your history of pain and pain management, not mine, sorry.

  —Fine, I’ll tell you about pain. This little rod you have digging into the back of my hand isn’t anything. Remember the Marathon bombing?

  —Were you there? Oh, your novel! Is that what your novel is about, really? Supernatural horror at some other public gathering, as a symbol for the real horror of that day.

  —Are you a Harvard psychologist or a community college English major? Whether I was there doesn’t matter. Did you see the picture? You must know the one I mean? He didn’t feel a thing either, I’m sure. His nerves were blown away along with the flesh and bone of his leg. Then there was the tourniquet. It didn’t hurt till afterwards. Not only didn’t that guy’s leg hurt, nothing else hurt either. Whatever problems he had vanished in that moment. Athlete’s foot, a sore shoulder, overdue bills.

  —He’s likely in plenty of pain now.

  —Ain’t we all?

  —Are you? Point to the face and number that most exactly describes the pain you are experiencing.

  0

  no hurt

  —Okay, still zero. Good to know. What’s the most pain you’ve ever experienced?

  —I was in the hospital one time. When I lived in Chicago. I had some problems back then. Want to hear about them?

  —How funny. We can talk about whatever you like about, within reason, during the experiment.

  —Oh, never mind, then.

  —Huh?

  —You said “within reason.” What I have to tell you isn’t reasonable.

  . . .

  —I was in the hospital because I was in pain. It was a blood-pain.

  —“Blood-pain”?

  —That’s what I called it, anyway. I even used the term in my novel. It’s pretty creepy, right?

  —Right. Sure.

  —Blood-pain is the pain created by black blood cells pulsing through your veins and arteries. That’s how I always imagined the blood-pain anyway. Something rough and sharp, like glass dust in your veins.

  —But black?

  —Like tiny shards of obsidian or something, slicing and slicing.

  —Did you see a hematologist or a . . .

  —Psychologist, yes. Who referred me to a psychiatrist. But only after I took a cheese grater to my arm.

  —Oh.

  —My other arm, of course. You can roll up the sleeve and take a look, if you like. I’d show you myself, but I don’t want to lose the experiment.

  —I told you, you can’t lose this experiment I’m sorry, Ms., uh, but we should end this. Of course, you’ll get your payout.

  —I don’t want to end this yet.

  —I’m going to.

  —Your mother talked about you a lot, in the hospital. I was there for a few months.

  —This is ludicrous.

  —Your name is Joanne.

  —That’s on the briefing sheet.

  —You love Shakira. Loved her anyway. My info is out of date. After all, it’s been years.

  —That’s on Facebook. Those damn privacy settings are always changing. You could have Googled my name while reviewing the briefing sheet.

  —She told you she hated you once when you were a girl. She used to hold your mouth open and spit down your throat to teach your stomach a lesson. She said that her spit was her soul and that this way she’d always be inside you.

  —Okay.

  —I didn’t set out to find you or anything.

  —Oh, is it all just a coincidence now? I should call security.

  —No, I mean it. Everything I said is true. I need the money. Freelancing is a horrible way to live, especially in an expensive place like Cambridge. I have to pay for my own home heating oil too. It’s like paying a thirteenth month’s rent. I saw your photo a few weeks ago on the bulletin board, along with the other psych grad students. You look like her, you have her last name, you’re the right age. I was here for another study. I decided I’d sign up to every experiment I could until I found you. I have something to tell you about her.

  —Well, what do you have to say? Did my mother have some last words?

  —“They’re coming for me. The orderlies are coming for me.” That’s what she said.

  —She was a paranoid schizophrenic. For all I know, you’re also a paranoid schizophrenic.

  —What if I told you that I saw something?

  —Okay, what did you see?

  —I saw two men, orderlies, walking past the window in my little room. All the doors have windows, of course, so they can do instant checks and so patients can’t ambush the workers by hiding in a corner or something when the door starts to open. I
t was unusual that they’d be passing by so purposefully. The doors are all locked, which I am sure is against the law and is absolutely a fire hazard, so I mushed the side of my face against the window so that I could see. They had a little tray, opened the door to her room, rolled it in, and locked the door again. They didn’t even go in.

  —Yes, I know all that.

  —What?

  —My mother slashed her belly open. Obviously she had to have some access to some tool or blade.

  —Yes, but. . . .

  —Have you been in pain, all these years, thinking of what you’d seen?

  —It took me a long time to climb out of my own black hole. And that made it even worse. What I’d seen.

  —Sure, that’s why most psych wards have been shut down. All sorts of terrible things happen there. It took my father a long time to find a proper one for my mother.

  —But it wasn’t a proper one, don’t you understand?

  . . .

  —Don’t you understand what I’m trying to say? Those staff members didn’t leave your mother alone with a sharp because they were incompetent or stupid. I think they wanted her to kill herself. They went out of their way to make it possible. What? Don’t you understand?

  . . .

  —Oh, come on. Don’t push that stupid Pain Rating Scale at me again.

  —Point to the face and number that most exactly describes the pain you are experiencing. You need your twenty dollars, don’t you?

  6

  hurts

  even more

  —Good. Now let me tell you something. I had to do a lot of favors, I had to do a lot of things to get where I am today.

  —What are you talking about?

  —Isn’t that how it goes in your dumb little novel? A practiced revelation, a public demonstration of so-called “evil.” I bet it is. Genre fiction is full of clichés and cheap irony.

  —Hey!

  —Here’s some psychology for you: you can never mask the self. Pick a mask, you’re just revealing yourself. You come in here and act all tough and weird, but that’s just you trying to deal with your trauma by spreading it around. And I, on the other hand, put on a nice little face. Objective and concerned with social science. But my experience with psychology is far more personal. Up close and personal. I bet that in your novel you had the bitchy woman dressed like a witch, maybe some fat guy dressed like a gluttonous monster with a giant month. Did the town slut dress like a sexy watermelon, or Elvira? The local bullies were skeletons and Frankensteins. And I’ll also bet the nice girl ended up playing Good Fairy Princess and saving some little kids in superhero costumes or something.

  —So your wing tattoos. . . .

  —I never felt freer than I did after I got my way.

  —Oh, I get it now.

  — . . . you do?

  —Orderlies don’t get paid very much, and frankly, most of them look like they’ve been hit in the face with a shovel every morning before work. A nice white girl ready to do anything for them, and in exchange all they had to do is make a tool available to your mother. That was the plan, and look, it worked. You’re almost successful, and almost normal. Almost.

  —No. I mean, it’s not my fault. Not completely. She could have decided not to commit suicide, after all. She could have slept through the night and the morning check-in would have found the blade and she would have been fine. Fine. But she wanted to. She wanted to. Suicide is just another form of pain management.

  —You know, there are many forms of pain management. I learned that the hard way, inside. Writing helps me. Drinking helps writers. Taking a drive with the windows open helps drinkers.

  —I can call security. Wouldn’t it be like something out of a bad novel if the security guards looked just like the orderlies in your old psych ward? But I’m not going to. I’m going to just lift the rod off your hand, like so, and ask you to point on the Pain Rating Scale to how you’re feeling right now.

  —You can call security if you like. You think I’ll be less free back in the booby hatch? You think you’ll be any freer with a fancy PhD and a tenure-track job at some little liberal arts college in Ohio? Tell me again about masks and the self, why don’t you?

  —Look, just let me get one last datum, and I won’t call security, and you’ll get your twenty dollars, and then you can go home and call the cops and explain that you, a poor horror writer with a psychiatric record and no proof, want to have me, a Harvard grad student with a nice bank account and lots of social capital and, frankly, a great pair of tits I inherited from my mother, arrested for secretly having my suicidal schizophrenic mom killed.

  —It’s funny that you think I’d call the cops. That I’d even have to call the cops. My work here is done.

  —Oh look, you pointed to the face with the tears running down its cheeks. It looks just like you. Hurts Worst. A perfect ten.

  —We’re holding hands, you know.

  —So we are.

  ____________________

  The best thing about being a freelance writer is that one can work from home, and thus live anywhere. The worst thing about not being able to drive a car is that one has to live in a place with extensive mass transit and walkable neighborhoods. That means that this freelance writer is doomed to live in one or another of the most expensive cities in the United States. For a couple of years, I lived in Somerville, Massachusetts, where rents are high and heating oil expensive, but there is the T, bus lines, and local supermarkets and bookstores. It was only a short walk to neighboring Cambridge, and the Harvard University campus.

  To make ends meet in an expensive and often freezing town, I signed up to be a lab rat for Harvard’s psychology labs. The pay varied widely, from a candy bar at the low end, to $100 at the high. I also did a few economics experiments for Harvard Business School, which generally paid better, but were much less interesting and offered less frequently. There were days when I’d hang around campus and do three experiments in a single afternoon. The first might be a questionnaire that paid five bucks, enough for a hot dog while I waited for an opportunity to play a video game by blinking my eyes for ten dollars. Then, a true battle of wits against an undergraduate as we role-played being diplomatic rivals for a chance to win twenty dollars. That poor freshman had no idea what hit her. Economic desperation makes for great motivation. I practically had her not only surrendering, but crowning me king of her imaginary nation.

  “Lab Rat” is a combination of a couple of experiences I had at Harvard. (Boy, that sounds much fancier that it was.) I participated in the pain experiment as described. The questions about death and suicidal ideation come from another experiment I participated in. I had to explain to a very nervous graduate student that I think about death often not because I’m depressed, but because I am a writer of dark fiction. That went well. I got my ten dollars and was allowed to leave anyway.

  I was in a down mood when I wrote “Lab Rat,” which is why it is a dialogue-only story. I was too emotionally exhausted to even contemplate writing descriptive passages or setting a scene. The story’s original ending was too much of a downer, too one-sided, and unfair to both participants. Cameron Pierce, editor of the wonderful, now-defunct, publisher with an awful name of Lazy Fascist Press, spotted the problem with the story and went beyond the call of duty by requesting a rewrite rather than simply rejecting it. I first met Cameron when he was a very young man at the World Fantasy Convention. He called me “Mister Mamatas,” declared that I was one of his heroes, and offered me a free copy of his first novel, The Ass-Goblins of Auschwitz. He was one of the writers of “bizarre” fiction who put me up in their shared hotel suite after I had drunkenly forgotten not only my room number, but the name of the hotel in which I was staying during WFC. Cameron has since grown into an excellent writer and an extremely insightful editor, and I was not only pleased that he took the story, I felt a bit of avuncular pride when he so expertly fixed a flawed story of mine, then published it.

  DREAMER OF THE DAY

>   HALLWAY, JUST NARROW ENOUGH FOR TWO. Tin ceiling, haze in the air. It’s a railroad apartment, three floors up. A pile of old toys and junk—half a bicycle, plastic playhouse all stained and grimy Day-Glo, empty wrinkled cardboard boxes, coils of cable—blocks the back door. By the front door, a small table littered with envelopes. Bills, looks like. Cellophane windows and a name over and over, in all caps.

  So you pick a bill, Paul says.

  Any one? Lil asks.

  That’s the fee. Pick a bill and pay it. This operator, he doesn’t leave the house, he’s not on anyone’s payroll. He puts his bills out here. You want to hire him, you pick out a bill and pay it. This is how he lives.

  Yeah but. . . . She bites her lower lip. Licks it. She’s a real liplicker. So what if I take this one?

  She taps a Verizon envelope. Her finger is fat on it, like crushing a bit.

  Maybe it’s fifty bucks. Maybe he calls lots of 900 numbers, she says. Is that enough, though? If he’s as good as you say he is—

  He’s the best.

  It’ll look like an accident?

  No.

  The finger comes off the envelope. No?

  It’ll be an accident, he says.

  Eyes roll. Whatever, she says. How can he live like this? I mean, if people can pick any bill they like and pay it, why would anyone bother to pay his rent when they could pay some fifty-dollar phone bill? The West Village, I mean, Jesus.

  Rent control. It’s not that bad. He’s been here for a long time, Paul says. Then he puts his hands to his mouth, cupping them. Waahh waaah waaah he plays, like a sad trumpet. Then he sings two words. Twi-light time. You know it? Paul asks.

  She looks at him.

  Glenn Miller, Paul says, plain as day.

  A cheek inches up, dragging her lips into a smirk. Another lick.

  Stardust. Google it or something. Glenn Miller vanished over the English Channel. He and his Army band were flying into liberated Paris to play and . . . He lifts his palms in a shrug.

  And they crashed and drowned?

  No, just vanished. Not a trace of him, or the band, or the plane. That was his first hit, they say, Paul says. That’s how old this guy is.

  I thought you said this guy makes his hits look like accidents, not like episodes of The X-Files, she says.