The Soho Press Book of '80s Short Fiction

by Dale Peck

  Lately every time it occurs to Debbie to play with herself her body inflates with despair so profound it annihilates her desire; the advancing sexual rush withdraws like film in reverse, so that the stem of Debbie’s body seals itself off from her caresses: Debbie’s own torso has snubbed her. When her eyes open every morning she’s cradled alone in a strange bed, she shudders in the milky light of dawn. Somewhere else a palm runs across a young girl’s nipple, you only have to think the phrase “young girl” to yourself and your body will react, the young girl’s lips part her legs part Debbie shuts her eyes against the glare. A wave of pain like electrocution surges through her muscles.

  Debbie is coughed from the subway’s warm esophagus to find herself blinking beneath a freeway, concrete girders pushing up from the ground like tibias discharged from a grave. “simply sonogram” this way, says a sign with an arrow. one mile. Debbie needs medical tests quite a lot, because a) she keeps discovering new symptoms of disease, and b) she doesn’t trust her body, especially since she can barely find it, so she needs trained professionals to provide a steady stream of diagnoses, not to mention actual photos to monitor and document the cunning vicissitudes of her insides.

  Sometimes Debbie feels as if her body is a moist vat incubating a brood of young, holographic Debbies, each one a nodule of fear; that her body cavities are host to a whirling circus of dismembered coltish legs, knees decomposed to jelly; that her skin is a sac filled with blood spilling from a little girl’s disembodied, raging mouth; that the girl’s scalp drifts through this red fluid trailing long hair like a squid; that the floating body parts of this girl who was Debbie are walled in by adult Debbie’s pulsing organs emitting the crimson worldbeat of sirens.

  Whenever God or whatever, Satan, Daddy lifts my skirt like he does at the slightest whim, Mommy the grim nurse takes a sample and drains off your fluids to replace them with a paralyzing potion like curare. What words can Debbie use for this secret procedure? It’s as if her strangled impulses to speak or scream circulate, mischievous protons, with increasing friction through her limbs and, finding no outlet, soundlessly detonate, their seething shrapnel searing new wounds, points of entry, receptors, into the surface of her cells. Diseased souls of the world can now dissolve in Debbie’s hair like creme rinse and enter her body through her scalp—fertilizing her cells with their own nerves, producing a serum of dread that leaks through her tissues, causing them to swell.

  Will she ever wake up, wonders Debbie as she strolls beneath the freeway, from this long dreamy state or zone of exile where she crawls and shakes with fever in the toxic dirt? Crawling one knee before the other and spindly vultures wheel in the bleached sky above your head. One knee before the other every day, inching from 34th St. to 35th, a node-shaped blip traveling from sector to sector on the grid, crawling back to your job in the distant skyline of white buildings dominated by a hospital’s authoritative, soothing facade.

  When she was younger Debbie liked an angular harsh zone far from any town, because in the chill space there was room for her anguish and desire. What had she been since birth if not a wet receptive nerve bundle pulsing in rhythm to the vibration of magnetic rays and microwaves beaming at her from the TeeVee and electrical transformers surrounding the house? Her nervous system was irradiated with the sexuality of radar and toxins so she grew up to find herself responsive to vistas suggestive of exile, waste products in decay beneath a solar glare, and alien force-fields of any type. Debbie would stand by herself brooding in the desert or other desolate western landscape, adopting a sensual and moody pose in the presence of rusting machinery, abandoned factories, and power substations, feeling as if the emotional substance secreted by her glands was leaching into the atmosphere to recompose as a poetic iron carcass, oxidizing like Debbie beneath a frigid, corrosive tongue of wind.

  Standing outside a prison now in her new urban setting, Debbie thinks The Mystery Is Gone, and a surge of excitement runs through her veins like a cold electric current; a naked bulb hangs in her chest where her heart was; steel bars compose her ribcage; and behind the prison fence Debbie senses a throbbing, sullen populace that wants to be her friend. As she leans against the chain link fence, an ambulance flashes past, a smear of red in the infected air. The white sky bulges like an eyeball swivelled back in someone’s head. Bits of virus cultured by the prison medical staff for testing on the inmates are released periodically from smokestacks into the bruised tissues of the sky. The membranes lining Debbie’s mouth and nose and throat are colonized instantly by spores and Debbie knows the prison grows inside her, composed of the cells of her tissue.

  Giovanni’s Apartment

  by Sam D’Allesandro

  He follows me all the way from the bus station to my neighborhood. It is late, almost no one out. When I turn around I can’t see him but I know he’s there. I can hear the click of his shoes against the sidewalk. I pass an old lady asleep in a doorway with a small gray cat. From the enormous pile of Macy’s bags its green eyes blink up at me, offended and unfriendly, before returning to sleep. Cats used to come up to me. That seems to be happening less and less lately. All the dogs and cats I run into seem to be on a tighter schedule and have more of a destination mapped out than I do. I’ve been feeling more alone than when I first moved here and didn’t know anybody. Now I know some people. That means I have less of an excuse to feel lonely but do anyway.

  The feeling doesn’t go away when, near the liquor store, a prostitute in spike heels and a big hairdo follows me for a block. Her smile turns venomous as we reach the intersection and I still haven’t said yes. “Well, if you’re not interested you could at least go to the liquor store and buy me a bottle of wine. Didn’t your daddy ever teach you how to treat a lady, little boy?” She serves up that “little boy” with plenty of extra snide. I like her flair for the dramatic.

  “Thunderbird 2000, that’s all I want, baby.” She’s back to the sexy voice she used when she first approached me. As I get closer to the intersection it nosedives into a grating, threatening whine: “Quit being such a piss ant. You don’t want to be a piss ant all your life, do you?” I guess this barrage must have worked on someone for her to put so much effort into it, but I’m already blasé about anything anybody might say to me late at night around here.

  In the middle of the next block I realize I can still feel him behind me, following in the distance. Even when I can’t hear him I know he’s there. I can feel him wanting me. As the gap between us gets smaller I start to feel what he wants to do to me. The whole hot scenario flashes through my mind, then starts to drop down through the rest of my body. A shivering wave of equal parts excitement and terror moves through my insides. I check to make sure the outside stays cool, stiffening all my muscles, especially my face. Guys like me mistakenly think that masks the vulnerability beginning to bubble up inside.

  A block later he’s ten steps behind me. “Are you gonna turn around and look at me?” The voice is low and quiet. It cements me to the square of sidewalk I’m standing on. I feel his eyes boring into the back of my head, making their way through a messy jumble of hair, skin, and tissue to an ugly unguarded place where thoughts are plainly visible. He stares at my fear and indecision like a grocery list. He’s going shopping in there. I’m embarrassed to have him get behind my facade so easily, but there’s nothing I can do about it. He’s already inside where, at the moment, I’m nothing but a whirring mass of confusion and desire. He can see what’s going to happen, what’s possible with me. He can see which of the things he wants he can get.

  Since I’ve been told to do so, in effect, I turn. I’m already giving him what he wants but that was going to happen anyway. I know that now, as my eyes check him out in nervous darts and jumps. You could make a picture out of the pattern my eyes follow as they scan his face, connecting from one point of interest to another, like a dot-to-dot drawn in by a hyperactive child. I mentally do so. The design hovers about an inch in front of his
face for a moment.

  That’s the only way I can really get a good look at him, disconnecting the face and putting the image slightly outside so I can see it without getting caught. So I can look at it, recognize what it means to me, and then there’s a feeling of giving into it as the picture hovers in front of him, slips away, and sinks back into the face it came from. He’s solid again, 3-D and threatening. There’s the hint of a smile on his lips.

  I first saw that smile, that face, in a beautiful black-and-white film. When I mention it sometime later, he says he did it as a favor for a friend. He was never in another. The film lasts about forty minutes. In it he’s almost a mannequin, his expression blank and unchanging as if it were painted on stone. He never speaks, although he’s in almost every frame. The camera follows him as he walks all over a city. Which city isn’t clear, as all the sites that could have distinguished it are left out. Dark and decaying urban neighborhoods, deserted blocks of apartment buildings, corner bars with tiny twenty-year-­old neon signs, stores shut and barred. Everything looks fairly normal, fairly sinister.

  He’s wearing a gray suit, or one that looks gray in black-and-white. It’s just rained and the pavement’s slick and shiny. The only sound besides ’50s jazz is the scrape and click of his shoes, snatches of disembodied voices drifting out from bars, a whoosh of tires against wet street in the distance. He moves through dark alleys, finally stopping at a door he seems to know. He knocks and, when a man comes to the door, he stabs him.

  This is my first glimpse of Giovanni. It’s the image I see in my head as we walk toward his apartment. I can’t say whether I’m more attracted to the Giovanni walking beside me or the Giovanni/killer from the film. For me, so far, they’re one and the same. I’ve actually spent more time observing the killer in the film than I have the flesh-and-blood person.

  Over me washes a warm flush of fear and fascination with the possibility of my own violent demise. I think of the film, how easy it seemed to him. I imagine a few possibilities and prepare to die.

  When he asks me my name, I stupidly shoot back, “Why do you want to know?” Instantly I wish I could grab the words back out of the air. Instead they hover there, naked and embarrassing, like a bad child I can’t disassociate myself from. I watch him give an invisible mental snort, then drop the whole thing as if it hadn’t happened. It’s not really important to his plan, after all. So I give up and tell him.

  We’re still walking in my direction. I haven’t had to make any turns yet that would show I’m leaving my route for his. From time to time a near-meaningless sentence falls out of my mouth.

  “It’s cold out tonight.”

  “Yeah, real cold.”

  He participates like a bad actor reading lines. We both know it’s not necessary. Its main purpose—that of alleviating my nervousness—doesn’t seem to be working. Besides, small talk sounds pretty silly when you put it alongside the thoughts running just beneath—both of us imagining a nakedness in the other we so far can’t confirm. I know one thing he doesn’t want—the me I appear to be to my friends. He wants a different me, naked and sweating and out of control, any iota of facade dissolved. And that’s exactly what I needed. Even I know that now.

  Inside my head I’m already beginning to imagine that I might be in love with him even as we’re walking toward his apartment, toward his bed, his body. I’m already starting to see him as a warm, slightly frightening oasis against the backdrop of cold, dirty pavement, trash and leering car lights. Still walking, I watch the comparatively tiny practical portion of me tell the romantic side to shut up since it doesn’t even know the guy.

  The pickup was that unremarkable. I was easy, but I had to be. I was a lonely, horny, walking bundle of need. I probably left a trail of the stuff on the sidewalk behind me like a snail slick. And everything about him worked: big enough, dark enough, demanding enough. There was no choice involved.

  The bedroom had black walls. Red light coming from a lava lamp on the floor made it a warm and luscious hell. A fat mattress on a low platform was the only furniture I could see. I was alone: Giovanni had gone into the other room for something. As I lay down it was like sinking into a dream, deeper and deeper, until I disappeared into the bed. The red light turns to black. I sink in deeper still and my thoughts slow until almost motionless, until they begin to drown in heavy waves of barbiturate-like nothingness. Everything dissolves: me, the room, my mind. All my anxiety from meeting Giovanni slips away leaving me in sleepy comfort. I only want to stay there, deep in soothing folds of darkness and ready to sleep like a child in a warm bed on a winter night.

  When I resurface he’s standing over me, naked, watching. His skin is drenched in the red light, glowing with it. I reach my arms up toward his. We stay in this picture for some moments as he savors the exquisite little gulf between my gesture and his body. When he moves an inch closer, my hand runs slowly down his velvet belly, over the red-liquid skin, and I draw him to me. Then he kills me and revives me three times.

  A month later he’s everything. Everything about him is too good: the body, the apartment, the silence. The calm he puts inside of me like one long continuation of the feeling I had sinking into his mattress that first night—that was just a small taste of what Giovanni could be for me. Something important, primal, needed. He treated the animal side of me with the same care and nourishing a mother lavishes on a baby.

  Now I remember that actually I’d taken some codeine on my way home that night. I was looking for a little induced calm. Things hadn’t been going so well and I needed to make my mind shut up for a while. But I forgot about that until sometime later, attributing all the dreaminess of the first night to Giovanni’s effulgence. By then he was installed inside me—the ultimate drug, effectively filling my bloodstream, warm and soothing, the thing that I wanted and knew I wanted. I loved knowing for a change.

  I’m now thirty days old, all a continuation of that first night—hot bath, dream without end, big fat death of the outside world. He used sex as a means of communicating. I need sex as a way to get into heaven. I didn’t know exactly what I wanted, and what I needed I got.

  He told me he had to be touching me in some way all night, or he couldn’t sleep: an arm slung across my back, a leg twisted together with one of mine, a hand on my hip. Most of all he liked me curled into his furry gut, the smaller curve of my body swallowed by his larger one. Together we formed one large womb providing a safety neither of us possessed on our own. Not so completely, at least. I was shocked to think he needed me. I was willing to let him have whatever I had that he might want, but I wasn’t sure what that might be. My attributes are invisible to me. The beauty he sees in me is different from that which I think of owning. He was falling in love with a person I didn’t know and I was that person.

  I stayed in the apartment for thirty-two days without leaving. I was swallowed. Day and night happened only indoors. The first day I almost made the conscious decision to take the day off, but it was more like I just didn’t want to go to work; then I didn’t go the next day, then never went again. It wasn’t a good job anyway. The first morning, as he was leaving, he came back into the bedroom—dressed now in the gray ’40s suit from the film, or one like it—leaned down, kissed me, and said, “Stay here, okay?” I remember lying in bed in the dark room and spotting the black telephone in the corner, with an answering machine attached. Its red-and-green blinking lights lit up a tiny portion of the darkness, maybe six inches square, reminding me of a miniature airport landing strip. I watched the little reds and greens for a long time, enjoying the warm dark, thinking about calling in, too lazy to get up, then too unconcerned. Then I never thought about the phone again for thirty-two days.

  The living room was sunny and warm most of the day, sun streaming in through the windows. They looked out onto the interior of a block of houses and apartment buildings, the part where all the backyards meet inside the block. If I tired of sunbathing
on the floor, I could go to the window and look out. Flowers, trees, dirt, garbage, a child’s swing set but no child, two women having coffee at an iron table. I couldn’t be bored. When even this simple panorama was too much for me to take in, I’d return to the bare symmetry of the sun-drenched floor. Even here the grain of the wood could fascinate or overwhelm me into shutting my eyes for a dreamless float. It’s all I wanted. Something had happened to me, I knew, but I didn’t know what and I didn’t really care to know. It was something I’d needed for as long as I could remember, only I’d never known what or how to get it. Somehow Giovanni was making it happen, was giving me the life I’d never had.

  I lay on the floor as if it were a beach. The bedroom was always red and dark, each color dissolving into the other, always night—deep, black, and empty. That’s the way I felt. It felt good. A lot fell away: my anxiety, my fear, my job, my apartment, my possessions, my need to create an existence. A new existence had already been created; all I had to do was slip into it. I started to feel alive again. My old life stripped away like dead skin. I abandoned everything that had happened before I met Giovanni. It disappeared. I was sick of carrying history around. If it had gotten me anywhere it was to Giovanni, and now that I was here I didn’t need to know how it had happened. Sex was a way to forget. Each night, each time he killed me and revived me, a little more of my past slipped away, leaving me free to be happy for perhaps the first time ever. I loved the emptiness. I felt clean for the first time since I was born.