Seraphim

by Jon Michael Kelley

  Newton was still accepting roses from the audience, it seemed, as everything was just as it had been the moment he stepped foot inside these walls.

  He was sure of it now: Gamble and his five pit bulls were still here. Somewhere.

  Hands on his hips, he shouted, “What kind of Mary Poppins crap is this, Mom? Shit or get off the pot!” He was enraged. “Bring it on, bitch! Bring it on!”

  Then, beyond the clear screen of tea balls, emerged the red, cloudy branches of the nebula he’d entered to reach Juanita’s mind.

  The ship was a mere white speck against the crimson stratus.

  His self-made illusion was still here, as it always had been. It had just remained hidden behind Gamble’s own chimera, which he feared was about to be eclipsed by Juanita’s reckoning.

  He felt like one of those Russian nesting dolls: a figure within a figure within a figure...

  As hard as he tried to get back on board the ship, however, it seemed he was going to remain stuck. He made a mental note to install a transporter room and a bagpipe-playing engineer when he got back. If he got back.

  “J.R., listen to me,” said his mother. “You were two months premature. The first eight weeks of your life were spent bonding with an incubator. Did you hear me? You were never on the tit. You ate formula out of a bottle. You were robbed, J.R., and I think that’s why you’re always talking to yourself, are always lost in your own little worlds.”

  “I don’t talk to myself,” Chris mumbled.

  “So, we’re gonna get those eight weeks back. Get ’em up and running again. Aren’t you just excited?”

  No, he wasn’t. He’d passed the bustling town of Excited many miles back and was fast approaching that frigid metropolis of Horrified, trying to figure out how dear old Mom planned on getting him back into her womb. Just as he was about to ask, the bubbles left their stationary orbits and began spreading themselves throughout the church, like the entire faculty of Texas A&M rushing out at Superbowl halftime to spell out some corny catchphrase.

  “And I know I never told you who your father was,” said Mom, “and that was unfair of me. No, it was cruel. So, I’m going to finally tell you.”

  Chris straightened, attentive to the voice behind the door. Neither he nor Juanita knew who his real father was, so the results of this paternity test promised to be entertaining.

  “I’m waiting,” Chris said.

  “Alright, it was...was...Liberace. Whew! There, I said it. Satisfied?”

  Chris shook his head. He was either the heir to a legacy, or Juanita was spending way too much time backstage fraternizing with the guests.

  “You’re not his type!” he shouted.

  “Just eight weeks, J.R.,” she advised. “God wants you back for just forty-nine days. Praise His holy name!”

  “Forty-nine days is only seven weeks, you moron!” he yelled, goosing her.

  “Maybe you’re going to be the next Baby Jesus!” she cried. “Praise all that is good!”

  He needed to stir the pot, get a change of scenery going. “Like, I think you failed the prerequisite for bearing saviors. In fact, I don’t think you were ever a virgin. I think you were born getting laid.”

  “I need you, J.R.,” she said. “I need you to make up those eight weeks.”

  Her voice was growing more urgent now. Privation was licking away the sugar coating. She was a starving dog on the other side of Juanita’s meat locker, pacing, salivating, and just moments away from believing that, with a little determination, the crack beneath the door might just be negotiable after all.

  “Why don’t you take a bath and soak on it,” he said. “Just lie back with a good book and the waffle iron.”

  “You always were a smartass, I’ll say that. But you’re not well, J.R., and I’m not well for putting up with it. Praise Jesus, I got bad things going through my head sometimes. But we’re going to make things right, aren’t we? No more of this paranormal crap, right? It’s blasphemy! Just eight weeks. Eight little old weeks. Just one week more than seven. Going to get you right. Think of it as church camp. Right as a rainy day in the park, you miserable little fuck.” Then she began to sing. “Eight weeks, eight weeks, who’s gonna change those dirty sheets? Eight weeks, eight weeks, who’s gonna slap those little cheeks?”

  “Oh no,” Chris groaned.

  “Eight weeks, eight weeks, Mama’s home and ain’t she sweet!”

  Chris did not like where this was going. At all. The scene was stagnating. Juanita’s psyche wanted him, was pulling madly at its leash, but someone had tied it to the porch. And he had a fair idea who that someone was.

  As a little experiment, he imagined Jack the Ripper sneaking up on his mother. Two seconds later, the muffled, twisted screams of a man fluttered through the church.

  He tried the ship again with no luck. He could still conjure, but couldn’t escape.

  His mother rapped urgently on the door. “It’s official, J.R. We’re moving out of this neighborhood. It’s full of English villains.”

  “Think, think, think,” he said as he tapped his forehead.

  Silently, the bubbles detonated, each one becoming a mini showerhead, spraying the church with liquid imagination. Every drop was a clever brush, adding its own prearranged piece while erasing the one before it. As the ancient venue melted surrealistically away, another was burgeoning in its place, like some chic Phoenix bubbling out of last year’s duds.

  This is what it would have been like, Chris thought, to watch the sprinkler system in Salvador Dali’s mind try and douse a fevered inspiration.

  The molten spray was not metabolizing his being; it just rolled down and off his body like mercury.

  He looked for a spot to jump, a place where what was and what is didn’t exist. He found one, right above the melting altar, but as he jumped, the mutating remnants of the organ fell from the ceiling, crashing upon the surface and blocking the entrance. Within seconds, the altar and surrounding area were the incomplete pieces of a long, bleak corridor of what looked like an infirmary.

  His window of opportunity was gone.

  Chris watched helplessly as the last fragments of the church succumbed to what was the gloomy interior of a neonate ward.

  4.

  Everything was aslant. Cold, stainless-steel beds lined the wall to his left, each one partially cocooned within thin, filmy curtains that dropped from oval metal tracks anchored to the ceiling. Accompanying the caveat atmosphere were sharply refracted shadows striping the slanted walls and black-and-white checked floors, as if a bright moon were piercing through the barred windows of an asylum.

  Chris imagined into being an intercom system, and a woman’s seductive voice filled the room. “Paging Dr. Hitchcock, paging Dr. Alfred Hitchcock, please report to pediatrics.”

  Chuckling, he imagined a small, unassuming cross on the wall above him. His talisman. Not that I’m finding religion, he assured himself. The cross appeared, and he watched it for a moment, making sure it would stay.

  From what he could gather, he was in some kind of glass enclosure. Within this cage were three crude gauges located in the upper right corner, all in the process of measuring the levels of “Oxigen,” “Tempreture,” and “Hummidety.”

  Juanita’s poor spelling skills brought a smile to Chris’s face. Then again, he realized, he had to give her some credit. He couldn’t spell worth shit in Spanish.

  The enclosure resembled a standard terrarium more than it did a neonate incubator. In fact, it seemed better suited for a gerbil than a premature human infant. Sawdust and cedar chips covered the floor, not a mattress, and there was a hose at one end, one he assumed was feeding him ‘oxigen.’ Above him, a wire-mesh lid rested snugly over the brink. There were no holes for gloved, attending hands to fit through, confirming his suspicions that tender, loving caresses were not authorized by his HMO, and had thus not been prescribed to facilitate treatment.

  He was still in adult form. Sort of. He still had on his surplice, his jeans, h
is Adidas…But in proportion to the rest of his surroundings, he was only eight or so inches tall.

  If there had been an exercise wheel and little green pellets to munch on, he would have been a happy rodent. Juanita obviously thought him a rat, and it was showing through.

  In the bed directly before him, something began to move. From within the curtains, a spectral rheostat gradually illuminated a small yet distinct form on the mattress. This mass then began to quiver like the jostled filament of a light bulb and became even more enlivened as it grew into the silhouette of a human female.

  When the figure stopped vibrating, it coughed.

  His heartbeat quickening, he watched the outline of her arm grab the curtain and slowly draw it aside. This maneuver, Chris realized, would have required at least a ten-foot reach from her reclined position on the bed. But this was Wonderland, where elasticity was a staple of every dreamer’s diet.

  This candid manifestation of dream mechanics, though, was a welcome relief from the level of waking reality that had so far dominated this trip.

  Haggard, the woman’s eyelids were partially drawn, and the half-circles that were visible appeared to be the lightest blue, just a shade or two this side of dead, with no noticeable pupils. Her blonde, oily hair spiked down her forehead like an EKG printout.

  She was naked and in stirrups, leering waggishly.

  It was dear old Mom. He wanted to turn away but didn’t dare. He’d learned to never turn away from anything in Wonderland.

  “J.R., you nasty little cocksucker,” she said, sounding delighted to see him. “I always knew this is what you wanted to see! Eight weekie-weeks!”

  “You have me confused with someone else,” he said, swallowing hard.

  She raised herself on both elbows and smiled, flashing him two rows of brown, rotten teeth, each one whittled to a fine point. Then she sang, “Eight weeks, eight weeks, don’t you think my pussy’s sweet?”

  And his mother was growing, maybe two stories high now. Gaping through the slightly scratched window, he watched from a gynecological perspective as her clitoris elongated into a finger, and then proceed to point down at her opening the way a big neon arrow does a roadside diner. While Chris and his pseudo-incubator seemed to remain their original sizes, she continued to get bigger and bigger, as did everything around her.

  When her height reached that of a grain silo, Chris could no longer stand it. “Holy shit!” He was so petrified he could barely think. If Juanita’s psyche could be called brilliant for discovering that one of his (like every other male’s) deeply latent fears was having incestuous relations with his mother, then it leaped to pure genius when it decided to shoot this snuff film from the Land of Lilliput.

  Juanita’s mind was pushing Mother closer to him. With every ten feet his mother grew, she encroached one foot upon his glass prison.

  Her vagina began to open, the labia spreading like wings. But instead of the rosy luster such parts normally portrayed, these appeared the color of spoiled turkey meat.

  After a quick study of the rest of her body, her face, Chris concluded that, yes, his mother was being offered as a live cadaver.

  “Gamble, you sick fuck!” he screamed, pounding on the glass. Not only was this intended to be an incestuous act of unparalleled dimensions, but it was looking like he’d nuzzled up to the bar just in time to make Two-For-One Happy Hour! Hi, I’ll have an incest straight up—no, make that an incestuous necrophilia with a twist of lemon, please.

  Chris tried frantically to teleport himself out of this half-ass rat cage, to move and make objects disappear, to turn himself into a variety of religious items and symbols, anything. Nothing was working.

  He inspected his surroundings again. The cross he’d put on the wall just moments earlier was now a clock the size of a child’s swimming pool, but it was Jesus, not Mickey, who was pointing out the hour. And Chris thought the Savior’s hands were indicating that now might be a good time for him to say his prayers. He tried turning it back into a cross, but it wouldn’t budge.

  “Fuuuck!” he screamed.

  The oxygen coming from the black hose stirred his hair. He brushed the bangs from his eyes, then pointed at the tube. “Son of a bitch!”

  It wasn’t oxygen blowing his hair around, he was sure of it. It was something lethal, piped in from Gamble’s own magic bottle.

  “Just concentrate, dude,” he told himself. “Don’t start getting paranoid. You’ve been here before. Don’t panic.”

  His mother and the room continued to expand, now at such a rate that Chris didn’t know if it was she who was quickly growing, or if it was he who was shrinking.

  Oh no.

  5.

  Georgia O’Keeffe was definitely not dreaming this picture.

  Hands and face against the glass, Chris was gripped with a new level of terror that would make an attack of rabid bats seem like a stroll through a butterfly farm.

  His mother’s vagina had now reached such dimensions that to hear a train whistle wouldn’t come as any surprise. Either the bed and stirrups beneath her had disappeared altogether, or they were now lodged in places he didn’t particularly care to imagine.

  “J.R.? I don’t think you’re taking me seriously. Hop on in, Slim! Eight weeks, boom badda bing, do ya wanna hear me sing?”

  His cage vibrated with the resonance of her thunderous voice. Behind him, just below her knees, her legs vanished into obscurity. Looking up, he could see just above her breasts. From there, storm cumuli obscured the rest; her head literally in the clouds.

  Chris didn’t need a dream analyst to explain that one. He’d always known his mother was scatterbrained. What he did need help deciphering was the meaning for the rest of this vignette that found him no taller than a celery stick and standing before his dead mother’s giant twat.

  Paging Dr. Freud, paging Dr. Sigmund Freud, please report to pediatrics.

  She stopped growing.

  “Just eight weekie-weekies, you possessed little bastard! Come down here and see your momma! Praise his holy britches!”

  Then his glass confines faded away, and he was on the floor, confronting a monster; two, if he counted the rest of his mother.

  The only items remaining from the ward were the tile floors and the fluorescent ice cube trays that shone directly overhead, stopping as they neared his mother’s crotch, just below timberline.

  As dread and nausea rolled heavily through his stomach, he reminded himself that laughter was the best medicine. And he had none other than Readers’ Digest to back him up.

  His mother again: “Eight little old weeks can seem like forever. Oops! There goes another rubber tree...”

  Then, as the last vibrations of his mother’s voice waned, he heard something else. He held his breath. There it was again, faint and watery and hard to track down. It reminded him of the echoing drip-drip-drip of a faucet.

  Whatever it was, it wasn’t the cadence of his heart, which was running on all horses now and way out in front of his sphincter, which had cramped up just moments out of the gate.

  As the sounds got closer, he determined their source. They were coming from inside his mother.

  Someone, or something, was in the cave. He forced himself to step closer. Yes, they were footsteps. Squishy, sucking footsteps, like someone walking across a muddy field. It sounded like only one person.

  Closer now, just inside the shadows. And whoever it was, they were humming. A tune, Chris thought, that sounded a lot like “Bringing in the Sheaths.”

  Just then, his dead mother drew her legs in at the knees, tightening the arena.

  Chris was hyperventilating now, his heart pounding his knees into tapioca.

  “Golden showers bring May flowers,” his mother sang, who then deluged him with just a squirt, sending him tumbling backward.

  On his back, Chris stared up at his mother in wild disbelief. “You fucking bitch!”

  As Chris slipped clumsily to his feet, a figure spoke from the cave’s entranc
e. “Why, Mr. Kaddison,” said Gamble, his voice echoing back into the chamber, “you smell like piss.” He reached around the fleshy pleats with his right hand and latched onto a single strand of coiled hair, then stepped out from the slippery entrance on agile feet.

  Chris’s heart felt like a castanet in a Latin musical. Drenched to the bone, he was growing dizzy, and his teeth were already chattering. His mother’s urine was freezing cold.

  “What?” Gamble said. “You were expecting Larry Flynt?” He was still in his gray suit, but was now wearing a white baseball cap, donning the witticism, Help! I’m Fallen And I Can’t Get Up!, embroidered in red brush script. It was passé, but he wore it well.

  Nearly breathless, Chris said, “Are you stalking me, dude?” Dripping, arms out from his sides, he was unsuccessful at conjuring even a towel.

  “I can’t help it,” Gamble admitted. “It’s just that you leave such a tempting trail of breadcrumbs.”

  “I like it nice and slow, J.R.,” said his mother, sounding now like the raunchy end of a 1-900 number. “Is that a tractor-trailer in your pants, or are you just happy—”

  “Hey, shut the fuck up, you dead, miserable cunt!” Gamble yelled. Then, smiling at himself, he turned back to Chris. “You were going to say...?”

  “Why would you want to follow an ‘amoeba’ like me?”

  Gamble looked shocked. “Why, Chris, if I had known you were so sensitive, I would have chosen a multi-celled invertebrate to make your comparison. But in answer to your question, it’s because I like you.”

  “Pardon me if I get misty.”

  “You have every reason to be angry with me. I’m afraid I might have been a little too harsh on you back in that dreary synagogue. My temper sometimes gets the better of me. It’s my Achilles’ heel, you might say.”

  “Something’s starting to stink,” Chris decided, “and it ain’t Mom’s box.”

  Gamble’s eyebrows shot upward. “Wait ’til you get inside.” Then he offered his hand. “Come, let’s take a sentimental journey.”

  Chris stepped back. “Let’s not and just say we did.”