“I tried to phone you.” She offered him a freckled hand. “I’m Skipper.” Turning to the camera, she asked, “You ready?” A man wearing a baseball cap and a headset gave her a double thumbs-up.
Rainbow Bright understood the camp’s official stance on media. It was here to exploit and turn the festival into a commodity which could be leveraged to sell other commodities: beer, condoms, anything young partygoers sought. Nonetheless, the media gave the burners a means to share their message and vision with the world. The trick was to not get snared with a gotcha question. He answered, yes, his name was Rainbow Bright. No, he was not the head of security for the tent city. His job was to facilitate communication between tribes. She asked the standard line of questions about fights. About drugs. About sexual assaults.
Out of left field, the presenter, Skipper, asked, “What’s a Code Spearmint?”
Rainbow wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly. “A code…?”
She nodded. “A sad clown told me to ask.”
Rainbow shrugged. “We don’t have that term.”
“It signifies a serial killer, does it not?” The redhead didn’t miss a beat. She pointed a finger toward the crowd that stood watching them. “That’s the clown, if I’m not mistaken.”
He followed to where her eyes focused in the audience, and there was a frowning clown. It looked familiar, but only because all clowns looked similar. Something about its eyes or the posture of its body.
Rainbow Bright flinched. “This isn’t like the outside world.” He flashed her an aw-shucks grin. “We don’t have anything remotely like that, here.”
“You’re saying that even with the drugs and young people and extreme conditions”—her eyes were laughing, daring him to tell the truth—“you’ve never had a killing?”
He pretended to think. Cocking his head. Furrowing his brow. A pitcher’s long windup before throwing a fastball. “No,” he said. “Never have.”
His phone chimed to signal a new text message. Live on camera. He’d been told to turn it off but was glad he hadn’t. With Skipper glaring, he checked the text. It was from Strawberry Shortcake, she was reporting on shouts and the sounds of a violent scuffle at the Angry Ninja Camp. Despite the cameras, he started to text her back.
To provoke a response, Skipper asked, “Is that your Code Spearmint?”
Rainbow used the message as his excuse to bail. He looked straight into the camera—another action they’d specifically forbade him to do—and he said, “Time to go fight the bad guys.”
By the time he left the makeshift stage the clown in question was gone. Absorbed into the milling masses of ballerinas and leather-clad bikers and drag queens.
Off camera, he called Strawberry. She’d found nil. Nothing to report. The Vampire tribe and some members of the Superhero tribe had heard a man screaming. Yelling for help. Before anyone could investigate, everything seemed to have returned to normal. As normal as it got for these parts. Rainbow Bright thought of Snidely Whiplash and wondered if some righteous ninja justice had been dished out.
At this point, each of Sandra Bernhard’s legs was as tall as a telephone pole. Fully assembled, she’d tower as high as an old-growth redwood. The schedule called for her to be burned in two days’ time. She’d hardly be finished before she’d be put to the torch. Rainbow Bright stood and watched as they hung the arms on her headless torso. The afternoon shadows stretched longer. By dusk, the shadows of everything went for miles, striping the vast flatness. Strings of Christmas lights were blinking on, and soon the great shadow of night snuffed out all the smaller ones. The clear desert air began to stink of diesel smoke from the generators. Somewhere, some idiot played the bagpipes.
On his phone, a text bulletin came through from the National Weather Service. High winds were predicted for midnight, and that meant another blinding dust storm. He hoped it would hold off. The gigantic papier-mâché penis was scheduled to burn at nine. A big crowd was expected. The evening consisted of the usual verbal altercations concerning love or drugs. A couple of cases of heat prostration. Tribes paid their respects as he ambled past their camps. Girls tossed candy necklaces over his head. People offered beer and chai. These were his people. Failed artists. Rejected musicians and writers. Part-time idealists and closet visionaries.
As a young man, he’d been an idealist in a corrupt world. It was no surprise that he’d turned out equally as corrupt, just a new and different form of corrupt. That might be the best any generation could achieve: to pioneer its own brand of corruption.
He’d attended art school, it was bunk. A stinking, lousy racket. They’d cashed his checks and told him he had Rembrandt potential. His advisors and professors, they’d painted a picture of his future prettier than any masterpiece they’d ever painted in real life. What a put-on. They’d told him he had talent. That word was heroin to the young. Talent. Four years, five years, six, and he’d kept buying the fix. His dream had been to do computer animation in movies, maybe video games. He’d spend his career bringing CG heroes and angels to life. Making the impossible possible.
Student debt and a string of service jobs—interrupted each year for this, where he’d met his wife, a woman who could stick to a boring pigeonhole—and finally he’d found his calling. A proctologist, of all people, had recruited him. Funny, but he used to trust doctors. Now he knew doctors were just like every other working stiff.
Rainbow Bright had suffered through his first sigmoidoscopy. Still high on the Demerol, he’d watched the video with his doctor. A guided tour of his healthy large intestine. They hadn’t set out to hatch a con. Just two smart guys acting smarter. Rainbow Bright had asked for a copy of the video. It was digital. Everything was, anymore. And he’d taken it home and stayed high and uploaded the colon footage to his digital animator. He’d Photoshopped JPEGs of the gnarliest precancerous polyps to be found on the web. These he merged with images of Jesus Christ. It was the most creative work he’d done since his boy-genius days in art school. Lastly, he’d planted the polyp faces on his colon wall and downloaded the video back to his sawbones. Shocked the butt doc, he did. They both got a good laugh, but then the good doctor took the prank seriously.
They only worked it on people who could afford to pay, people with lavish insurance coverage. It was a scam, of course. When a sigmoidoscopy revealed no abnormalities, Rainbow worked his art school magic. One gander at the horrors Rainbow so meticulously detailed inside them and people begged to go under the knife. No cutting actually took place. Maybe some drugging and poking around, but nothing traumatic. The patients went home, stoned, energized with new life because they’d cheated death. Rainbow Bright and his doctor split the fee. Money rolled in.
As of late, he’d taken a couple of commissions from an oncologist, doctoring chest X-rays. Tumors mostly, some tuberculosis. Not that he needed the money. He just wanted to explore a new avenue for his artistic expression. It was a con, a dirty con and a scam, but no more so than art school had been. Besides, it proved one thing: Marcel Duchamp was right. Nobody could hoodwink the French. Context was everything. You could depict something lovely, a lovely sun setting over a lush rose garden, and no art lover would fork over a red cent. But if you executed a masterpiece, something misshapen and discolored, and you stuck it up some rich somebody’s ass, they’d pay a king’s ransom to have it gone.
By nightfall, the mammoth penis loomed over them. So tall it disappeared into the gloaming. It was of course uncircumcised.
As a crowd of thousands watched, a nude Sex Witch stood off at a distance and pulled back the string on a bow. With perfect aim, she shot a flaming arrow which traced a bright arch across several thousand retinas before lancing the glans. Every man present winced. The flames roamed in every direction, like some blazing herpes flare-up. Following that, firecrackers popped. The brand that whistle, Piccolo Petes, were beginning to shriek. Other fireworks exploded, rocketing sparks into the night sky.
To his imagination…it had to be his imagination, but
the Piccolo Petes sounded almost human. By then it was too late to listen. Everyone was shouting and wailing, dancing in circles around the fiery spectacle.
The screaming inside the penis prompted the crowd to scream. In the din, Rainbow Bright noticed Snidely Whiplash sidle up beside him.
His eyes on the fire, Whiplash said, “Dude picked a fight at Mud Camp. Said his stars and knives went AWOL.”
The night air smelled like barbecue, but no more than it always did. Grilled meat and diesel smoke and gunpowder.
Snidely sounded self-righteous. “We took a vote. Dude lost.” He continued to stare at the burning phallus. “Don’t worry,” he added, his focus never leaving a certain high-up spot on the pyre. “We gave him enough Rohypnol to knock out a horse. Dude won’t feel a thing.”
For a moment, to Rainbow Bright, the festival no longer looked like the future. It looked like demons smeared with blood and feces, dancing around a tower of flames, accompanied by the music of tortured screams. It was the weed, he told himself, it was the weed, until his vision went back to what he wanted to see. Until foremost among his worries was the question of where he’d be able to acquire two pounds of fresh ground beef.
The penis spent itself into the night sky. Slumped to one side. Collapsed sideways in slow motion. And the fire burned down to a hill of coals the Mystic tribe wasted no time in walking all over. As predicted, the winds were picking up. People started heading for shelter. It was going to be another pea soup dust storm.
Even the biggest raves, the Neverland Camp, and the Applied Science of Kinetic Ritual Laboratory, they pulled the plug on account of hurricane-force gusts and blowing dirt. The air grew so thick Rainbow Bright couldn’t see from his tent, down the path as far as the Sex Witch Camp. He couldn’t make out the lights of the Chow Tent. The moon and stars were blotted out.
From the comfort of his sleeping bag, he dialed a number he knew by heart. “Thumbelina?” It was her festival name. In the outside world, she stuck to her birth name. Sloane. Mrs. Sloane Roberts. He asked, “Are you okay?”
She asked, “Are you okay?”
Exhausted, he replied, “We had an incident, but it’s resolved.”
“Ludlow?”
He hesitated. “Not to worry.”
He heard her waiting. He listened to her deciding something. He could hear the roar of the sandstorm building outside the tent. Scouring the desert clean. Erasing from his memory the screams of a killer burned alive. Where his next words came from, he wasn’t certain. When neither of them had spoken he waited for the silence to deepen. He waited longer. At last, he spoke. “A dog got into our school, this one time. I was in fourth grade. It ran around and licked everything. I was eight years old, and that dog made me aware of everything I was giving up forever.” That’s all that came to mind. He’d had his say.
Sloane or Thumbelina, she seemed to understand. His wife countered, “It made the children laugh and play, to see a lamb at school.”
She understood. To stay at home was to doom his children to a future of the same. This was the cradle of a better civilization. She had to see that. This wasn’t a midlife crisis or a stopgap measure, but an original option. Seekers had always trekked into the desert in pursuit of a big answer.
“I was thinking,” he said hopefully, “maybe next year we’d all attend the festival as a family.” He was drifting toward sleep.
Her voice stiff, soft but not-unsympathetic, his wife said, “There won’t be a festival next year.”
Rainbow Bright marveled at how close and clear she sounded despite the wind.
Her voice dropped to a purr. A teasing murmur. And she said, “Ludlow?” She said, “I’ll make you a deal.”
He echoed, “A deal,” unsure he’d heard correctly.
“If you’ll come home,” she offered, “I’ll stop killing your people.”
Rainbow Bright was instantly wide awake. He hadn’t told her. Strawberry Shortcake didn’t have her number. Nobody but him had this number.
She whispered, “A throwing star to the back of a stupid Mud Man’s head…does that ring any bells?”
Everyone here used fake names. So many wore masks. Was Sloane capable? Yes, once she’d been a savage, smeared in crud. When they’d first met, she’d been the throwing half of a knife-throwing act. But now she was a mommy who chauffeured kids to soccer practice.
The voice over the phone asked, “Who do you think told your television friend about ‘Code Spearmint’?”
He asked, “Where are Lisa and Benny?”
“With their grandma Roberts.”
Ludlow Roberts asked, “While Mommy slaughters burners?”
Today, she’d been the clown who’d given him the evil eye. The sad clown in the audience. Tonight, she’d allowed them to execute an innocent man, and she’d danced among the furbies and the zombies and sweating, disguised revelers. A real monster among the make-believe ones.
Listening, he felt heavier and heavier as if, instead of his purple sleeping bag, he lay in a bathtub as the warm water ran out from around him. No longer buoyant, he could feel the full weight of his bones and flesh. A burden suddenly too heavy to budge. The inert bulk of someone dead.
The voice on the phone dictated, “Tomorrow, you’ll make up some excuse, and you’ll come home before I go after another.” She paused. “You decide.” And she hung up.
The wind, the wind made people crazy. In the dense, blowing sand, she might be a few feet away. The tent city was filled with drunks and drugged-out kids, and if the dead ninja was to be believed, she’d stolen his arsenal of pointed, honed, and razor-bladed weaponry. She knew that if he called the police, the party was over. Finished forever because he’d neglected his husbandly duties. If he didn’t fold his tent, more people would die.
At best, he’d go home to a ruthless killer.
His fingertip rooted around in his navel, searching, rummaging, and plucked out the hundred-milligram Luminal tablet. People took their leave of the tent city every day. Others arrived. There was no keeping track. At worst, every night would cost the life of another person. He pictured Strawberry Shortcake dead. Tinky-Wink. Sun Baby. He could call her bluff. Maybe, if he got the word out, they could catch her. Do damage control.
One burner per night, that penciled out to seventeen more dead. Every year a kid or two left a party, staggering into the windblown sand, and was never heard from again. The desert consumed them as a sacrifice. As tribute. Somewhere in the thousand square miles of wasteland, the storm buried each of them where they fell.
Build it. Burn it. Build it. Burn it. Worship and destroy.
He’d need the Luminal, tonight. Even as he fell asleep, he felt the excitement growing in his chest. A worthy game was afoot. If he caught her, then what? Knowing the truth, could he drug her? Would he roast his wife, alive, within the head of a gargantuan Sandra Bernhard? Now that he knew how great and glorious-grand was his wife’s devotion?
LITURGY
In light of recent property damage at 475 Battlinghamshire Court, the homeowners board would like to reiterate association policy on both dog ownership and the proper disposition of biohazardous organic materials. As per association regulations, all domestic dogs must be tethered or fenced within the property lines of the owner. At no time may a dog be allowed to roam unattended.
As for human remains, county health regulations require that they be relinquished to the acting authorities for sanitary disposal. Under no circumstances is burial at home permitted.
Compliance with either of the aforementioned regulations would have precluded the recent wide range of property damage. It is now possible, by creating a timeline of destruction, to chart the course of the medically hazardous material in question and to implicate the animals involved. The first reported incident took place on May 17, between the hours of 10:00 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. The partially decomposed remains were apparently disinterred from an unknown location by a dog. In this initial case, the apparent culprit was “Buttons.” Once
exhumed, the family beagle relocated the remains to the formerly white, shag-carpeted master bedroom at 475 Battlinghamshire Court, where they were cavorted upon for an unknown period before being interred in the backyard of that property.
By mapping the path of damage from 475 to 565, 785, 900, 1050, 1075, and 1100 Battlinghamshire Court, it’s possible to trace the unhappy progress of the thoughtlessly discarded human viscera as it was discovered and relocated by a series of both domestic animals and indigenous vermin, namely rats or raccoons, all of whom lay claim to the increasingly decayed item, abused it, and interred it at a new location. Similar property damage to carpets, upholstered furniture, and bedding suggests the contraband found its way, next, to Surreydaledown Mews. Significant evidence of it follows in several households along Knightsbridgeton Close and Regentrosetudor Crescent. Owing to the increasingly unstable qualities typical of degrading tissue, each subsequent visitation created a more detrimental and lasting effect on the soft furnishings of each home.
A special assessment has been proposed to cover the expense of draining and cleaning area swimming pools. In addition, residents are encouraged to review their vaccination histories; most notably those bathers who encountered the item, failed to recognize its nature, and mistook it for a sad, purple, deflated beach ball. In at least once instance, flinging it at one another in oblivious delight.
This, this abomination was the waterlogged, alien horror that the youngest Sanchez daughter innocently retrieved from that household’s swimming pool. Using a pair of barbecue tongs, she lobbed it over a hedge, landing it in the DiMarcos’ pool. There it was discovered by that family’s oldest son, Danny, who eschewed taking any noble and decent action. Instead, he pitched it up, onto the roof next door at 8871 Ivy High Street. There, it was feasted upon by crows, one of whom eventually carried the sodden carrion aloft, high into the blue summer sky, losing purchase of it directly above the chaise lounge occupied by Ada Louise Cullen. At this point, the journey of the nuisance ceased abruptly.
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