Corpus Chrome, Inc.

by S. Craig Zahler

  The mattress exhaled air into the candlelit room, and the surface of the bed sank two centimeters.

  Osa lay about Lisanne like a beautiful fortress. The tall woman’s anxieties had been dispelled by the long, unhurried night of lovemaking, and now she slept deeply. At present, the petite blonde did not feel like a ghoul.

  The mattress inhaled and rose two centimeters.

  Lisanne relished how creative and free the experience of being with another woman was—the lack of directionality was so unlike being with a man, where things inevitably led to a specific culmination. With Osa, there were no issues of timing, nor was there a defined goal: Their explorations had lasted for three tactile, wandering hours and multiple climaxes.

  The mattress exhaled, and sank two centimeters.

  Lisanne felt: warm air issue from Osa’s nostrils into her short blonde hair, heavy breasts press upon her back, two hearts beat in slow aquatic syncopation, and the curve of the tall woman’s hip against her buttocks. The Swedish-Indian American was tall, and her presence was gigantic.

  “I’m glad you don’t want to use toys or artificials,” remarked Osa, awake but groggy. “They’re not really my thing.”

  “I am not interested in replicating heterosexual intercourse when I am with a woman.”

  Osa kissed her nape.

  “I thought you were asleep,” said Lisanne.

  “I was, but I’ve never slept on a breathing bed before, and it keeps waking me up.”

  “I can turn it off—or lower the respiration rate.”

  “Don’t. I like waking up beside you.”

  A hand slid underneath the hem of the petite blonde’s negligee and along her stomach, and stopped at her flat chest, where a moist index finger feathered her right nipple until the bud stiffened, and she could feel her pulse within it. Long warm legs twined about Lisanne’s right thigh, and Osa began to sway, her nexus damp.

  The discussion had ended.

  In the candlelit silence, bodies and eyes communicated.

  * * *

  Bright morning light poured through a sunburst-shaped window, illuminating the bedroom.

  With terrific aches throughout her body, Lisanne walked toward Osa, who was still abed. The long beauty was wholly hidden beneath a beige cashmere blanket, which hewed closely to her hips and shoulders.

  “Guten Morgen,” Lisanne said to the curvilinear heap.

  Osa grunted.

  “I have made breakfast for us.”

  Again, the covered figure grunted.

  “I do not speak cavewoman.”

  From beneath the blanket, Osa complained, “It’s bright in here. I can deal with the breathing bed, but morning sunlight is definitely out.”

  Lisanne whistled a C-sharp and said, “Pinhole.” The meter-tall malleable window narrowed to a hole three centimeters in diameter. “It is safe to come out.”

  “Danke.” Osa pulled the covers from her squinting face and looked around like a newborn kitten unsure of the world into which it had been born. “Um…can you get me my clothes? They’re kind of dirty, but I can’t really eat breakfast nude.”

  Lisanne put a folded silk robe on the mattress. “Wear this.”

  “I don’t think it’ll fit—you’re probably a size zero or something.”

  “I am, although I prefer to wear size two.” The petite blonde pointed to the robe on the breathing bed and said, “That is a six long. I had it delivered while you were asleep.”

  Osa glanced at the garment and looked up, grinning. “That was really, really sweet. Thank you.”

  Lisanne pointed to the toilet icon on the east wall. “There is a bottle of toothscrub beside the sink.”

  “Great.” The tall beauty sniffed the air and excitedly inquired, “What’s for breakfast?”

  “Eggs, salmon, crab cakes, dill cheese, black toast and veal sausage.”

  “Danke, Fraulein.”

  * * *

  Lisanne sipped a quadruple espresso while Osa drank a peach mimosa. Outside the glass picture window, the sibling cities of Nexus Y and Brooklyn sat like children’s toys at their feet. Two birds, a hasty cloud, an escaped balloon and a police airborne riot wagon sped past the pane, casting brief shadows upon the glowing faces of the women.

  “I need to be in the studio in a couple of hours,” said Lisanne. “A barrage metal band scheduled a session today.”

  “Can I watch you produce? It’s okay to say no—I’d just love to see you work sometime.”

  “You would be a distraction.”

  “For who—I mean, for whom?”

  “Everyone with eyes—especially me.” The petite blonde thought of the other woman’s hands gripping her ankles…of straddling her strong thighs…of her taste.

  “You’re blushing,” said Osa.

  “The espresso makes me warm.”

  “Now you’re blushing more.”

  Underneath the buoyed table, a long foot sluiced up Lisanne’s calf and across her inner thigh. Osa grinned as if she were aware of—yet not responsible for—her foot’s actions.

  * * *

  After they had twined once more, the two women clothed themselves, exited the apartment that wore their scents and descended to the mustard lobby.

  The pair stopped in front of the living wall that led outside and looked at each other: The moment was pregnant.

  “Shall I tap a cab?” inquired Lisanne.

  “I’m going to walk around the park for a while—I’ve got today off. And tonight.” This last statement was emphasized.

  “The recording session will go well past midnight.”

  Osa looked disappointed, but did not say anything.

  The petite blonde took the tall beauty’s right hand. “There is no way I will enjoy a night with these egomaniacs as much as I would another evening with you, but I do not want to set a bad precedent with us.”

  Osa clapped her hands to the sides of Lisanne’s face and kissed her as a male teenager might—suddenly and forcefully.

  The tall beauty pulled back, smiled, turned around and walked through the living wall, pleased by the other woman’s rather significant usage of the first person plural.

  * * *

  Lisanne tilted her head up, eyeing the giant in the wolfskin jacket who stood before her. “I know you think that you can record this music live in the studio, but you cannot.”

  “We play it that way all the time,” said Eater of Your Eyeballs, a frown upon his granite-studded face. “Don’t tell us what we can or can’t do.”

  “That is exactly what I’ll tell you. I let you try it your way, and the results are not good enough for a true-definition spherical recording, nor are they anything that I will put my name on.”

  Lisanne could tell that Eater of Your Eyeballs wanted to call her a cunt, but his mutterings were unintelligible.

  Intestinal Noose put his hand on the irate guitarist’s arm and said, “This is why we hired her.”

  Eater of Your Eyeballs growled in defeat, picked up his nine-string guitar (from which dangled an embalmed bald rat that had a nail in its head) and walked through the living wall.

  “I’m sorry, Miss Breutschen—EYE’s kind of temperamental,” said Intestinal Noose, tying his steel-dyed hair back into a ponytail. The drummer seemed like a shy, effeminate boy who found confidence and masculinity in his fashion choices and musical identity.

  “We need to record the drum tracks first,” Lisanne informed the percussionist.

  “Okay.”

  “Your eleventh and twentieth tom-toms are not correctly tuned.”

  “I’ll fix them,” said Intestinal Noose as he walked through the wall into the suspension sphere, where his drum ki
t sat upon the intersection of four catwalks, surrounded by amplifiers that pointed up, down, left and right.

  King Cancer, Unspeakable Intentions and Satan’s Amazing Father entered the mixing room, vapor tubes wedged in between their fingers and lips; the young men were uniformly distinguished by granite studs, wolfskin jackets, black jeans and steel-dyed hair.

  Lisanne pointed at the short lead singer. “Do not inhale vapors—they will affect your vocal cords.”

  “Sorry, Miss Breutschen,” said King Cancer. He secreted the offending tube and, accompanied by the bassist, entered the suspension sphere.

  “I’m a really big fan of your music,” Unspeakable Intentions said to Lisanne. “So’s Satan’s Amazing Father.”

  “I am pleased that you enjoy my work.”

  “I studied sequentialism in music school—my thesis narration was on you and your sister, and I even wrote a piece of sequentialism, though I’m sure you’d hate it. I don’t know if you can tell, but you’re a big influence on our music.”

  “I hear the influence.” Lisanne had heard a few purloined melodies as well, but found that they sounded charming in the context of barrage metal.

  “Are you going to do more pieces—by yourself?” he asked, oblivious of how personal an inquiry this was.

  “I do not know,” answered Lisanne, honestly. She then looked through the window into the suspension sphere and remarked, “You boys need to tighten up the departure section in ‘The Sound of Twelve Men Getting Crushed in a Soviet Printing Press.’”

  “Yeah—that’s where we came apart.” Unspeakable Intentions left the room and joined his metallic comrades within the sphere.

  The band practiced the rather difficult bit of polyphony in which the four guitarists played completely different riffs in different time signatures that interlocked once every twelve seconds.

  “Eater of Your Eyeballs is late at the joining,” remarked Lisanne into the microphone that fed into their earplugs.

  The man cursed.

  “Play it again from the top,” she ordered.

  The petite producer watched the seven men expel their furies as the tall beauty’s eyes and lips and hair and neck and arms and hands and fingers and nipples and nexus and buttocks and thighs and feet and toes pulled at her thoughts.

  Lisanne yearned wonderfully.

  Chapter IX

  Garbage and War

  A foam-rubber car bounced off the front of the thundering orange and green garbage truck, veered into a bubble moped and bumped into a box van. Mikek cackled as he watched the accidents accumulate upon the frontview, rearview, and sideview octagons that comprised his bugview windshield.

  “That wasn’t nice,” said Champ, seated in the sucker’s seat directly behind the driver, observing the carnage.

  “I ain’t nice,” admitted Mikek. “You can even ask my momma.”

  “Don’t really need to ask anybody.”

  Of the three men with whom Champ sucked garbage, Mikek was the smelliest, the fattest, the rudest and the meanest, yet somehow, he was happily married and the father of two irrefutably lovely girls.

  The driver eased the steering staff to the left, and the garbage truck turned onto Ninth Avenue.

  “You see her?” said Mikek; he pointed a stubby finger adorned with silver hair at the bugview windshield. “You see that dairy?”

  Champ looked at the indicated octagon and saw a brunette woman clothed in tight-laced jeans and a leather vest. “I see her.”

  “I’d hit her with the truck.” This was the phrase that the porcine driver uttered whenever he wanted to compliment a woman.

  “I’m sure she’d be flattered.”

  “Run right over her.” Mikek clapped his hands together and then reclaimed the steering staff. “Flattened.”

  The garbage truck sped up the street, and the woman shrank in the rearview octagon until she became indiscernible pixels. A red light on the dashboard map blinked, indicating a full canister.

  “Shit on shit,” said Mikek, who was never happy about sucking garbage. He thumbed the accelerator, jerked the steering staff and nudged a foam-rubber ladybug out of the way. The fellow then snorted, satisfied by the small car’s discomfiture, as if he had just attained some long-sought revenge.

  “People’re always making garbage,” complained the driver.

  “Yup.”

  The truck swept past a yellow traffic orb and toward a loaded orange cylinder, which was two meters tall and half as big around. Mikek steered the vehicle into the niche beside the receptacle (he was an expert driver) and thumbed the brakes.

  Dressed in a bright orange suit and hard boots, Champ opened his door and walked to the rear of the truck, where he dialed his passcode into the ‘Dissolvent Authorization’ placard, grabbed the nozzle of a juice hose and dragged it to the canister.

  “Any bodies in that one?” the plump fellow asked, and then laughed. Sergio had found a corpse in a canister three months ago, and the grisly discovery had inspired Mikek to utter this joke several times a day.

  Champ lifted the flap and surveyed the garbage. Bottles, wipes, a diaper, candied broccoli, soy bits, vapor tube boxes and the smell of garbanzo beans filled the receptacle. He then shut the flap, inserted the nozzle into the sprinkle valve at the top, twisted the lock, and dialed up one liter of juice.

  The hose jerked briefly, like the death twitch of a snake, and fluid shot into the canister. A few pieces of metal crackled defiantly as the dissolvent broke down the disposable and biodegradable trash, but ultimately, the juice won all of its battles against rubbish.

  The fans at the top of the receptacle whirred and sucked up the fumes. Champ plucked the sibling hose from the truck, pulled it to the canister, locked the nozzle to the bottom valve and waited while the garbage was rendered into what was variously referred to as twat piss, diarrhea, shit serum, shit sauce or—by polite garbage men—soup.

  “Hurry it up,” prompted Mikek, who was restless by nature.

  “I’m not an alchemist.”

  The canister light illuminated. Champ walked to the rear of the garbage truck and turned on the straw; the soup was sucked into the vehicle’s containment tank where it was stabilized with an antacid.

  Twenty seconds later, he unplugged the hoses, locked the canister valves, replaced the nozzles and clambered back into the vehicle.

  The garbage truck prowled.

  Champ found the simple acts of condensing, consolidating and disposing of waste satisfying in a way that his executive job at Golden Opportunities had never been. His ex-wife had been appalled when he explained his philosophy to her over the phone, but he was not lying about how he felt. His job, his derided occupation, made an actual, physical difference in the world. If he could not make people laugh for a living, at least this job effected some positive change in the world.

  “A lot of twat piss in that one,” said Mikek, tapping the gauge on his dashboard. (The quantity of reduced soup varied significantly, depending upon the contents of the canister.)

  “Yup,” said Champ, satisfied.

  * * *

  Twilight in Nexus Y was a jumble of buildings, people and vehicles etched in gold by the falling sun. Upon Tenth Avenue, the plasticore garbage truck menaced, dragging its long blue shadow.

  “Look at that one!” said Mikek, pointing out a curvaceous woman. As the vehicle passed the walking object, she flashed across a lateral octagon and then appeared in a rearview. “I’d really like to run her over,” he said, “maybe even show her the axle a second time.” A stubby finger tapped the rearview octagon, and the woman’s buttocks were magnified.

  Champ looked away, embarrassed.

  Mikek whistled. “I’ll be running over that thing in my dreams.”

 
The man in the sucker’s seat had no reply worth uttering.

  A red light blinked upon the dashboard map.

  “Shit on shit.”

  The driver reset the screen to standard bugview, coughed, sucked on the vapor tube, gauged the traffic, said, “So many foes,” and nudged two ladybugs aside. “It was better when we only did pick-ups at night.” He motioned expansively at his two-, four- and six-wheeled adversaries.

  “The canisters fill up too quickly,” remarked Champ.

  “They should make more…though I guess this helps us get some overtime,” said Mikek, arriving at a stalemate with himself.

  Wheels whined as the driver flung the vehicle into a niche.

  Champ exited the truck and noticed a score of people on the sidewalk, all of whom were looking in one direction. Following their gazes, he saw the façade of an antique bookstore.

  “Hurry up,” Mikek prodded, “we need to get going.” Thursday evening was the end of the professional workweek, a time during which women went to parties and clubs and bars in alluring outfits that the driver needed to appraise. “It’s important that we’re on the road.”

  Champ walked the nozzle to the canister, locked it in the valve, assessed the garbage (vapor tubes, drink bulbs and soy wrappers that smelled like hamburgers) and dialed up half a liter of juice. As it squirted, he looked back at the gaping throng.

  “It’s coming out!” said a little girl.